Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

‘Arż-ı ḥâlim râya düşdüm çoġ efġân eyledim
Leyli-veş beyt-i hazînde ḫûn-ı giryân eyledim
Câme-i ṣabrım ṭutup çâk-i girâbân eyledim
Ṣoyunup ‘abdal olup bu çeşmi gîrân eyledim
Kendimi ‘aşḳıň yolunda şöyle ḳurbân eyledim
Gerden-i mecrûḥımı kesdim ḳızıl ḳan eyledim

In English

1. To lay my state before (you) I took to the road and lamented much. Like Leylâ, in the house of sorrow I shed tears of blood. I seized the garment of my patience and rent its collar. I stripped and became a wandering dervish (abdal) and made this eye weep. Thus I offered myself as a sacrifice on the path of love; I cut my wounded neck and stained it with red blood.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text is the first stanza of a poem on page 102 of the cönk. Hakverdioğlu records it as "Gazel: (Müseddes)"; the müseddes is a verse form built of six-line stanzas. All six lines of the stanza end in "-ân eyledim": "eyledim" (I made, I did) is the redif, and the sound "-ân" in "efgân, giryân, girâbân, gîrân, kurbân, kan" is the rhyme. The lines follow the pattern "fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün"; the identification of the metre is ours. For this poem Hakverdioğlu refers to page 218 of the book Kerbelâ Mersiyeleri by Mehmet Arslan and Mehtap Doğan; it appears that the full text of the poem is published there, but we could not see that book. The words "râya", "girâbân" and "gîrân" are given as read in the article; we believe they should be understood as "râh" (road), "girîbân" (collar) and "giryân" (weeping).

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The stanza is built of the words of a lover who strips himself of everything for love, and each line counts a sacrifice. "Beyt-i hazen", the house of sorrow, is a phrase recalling the house in which the prophet Jacob wept for his son Joseph; Leylâ is the beloved of the story of Mecnun. "Câme-i sabr" is the garment of patience; rending the collar is the traditional expression of mourning and despair. "Becoming an abdal" means renouncing the world to become a wandering dervish. In the last two lines the language grows heavy: the lover says he has sacrificed himself, cut his wounded neck and stained it with red blood. Hakverdioğlu's linking of the poem to an anthology of Kerbelâ elegies adds another meaning to these images. Kerbelâ elegies commemorate the martyrdom of Husayn at Kerbelâ in 680; sacrifice, the severed neck and red blood are familiar images of this tradition of mourning. Kerbelâ is not named in this stanza; reading the poem as an elegy rests on the full text and on Hakverdioğlu's reference. Dertli's closeness to Bektashi circles makes it unsurprising that he should write such a poem.

Historical Context

According to Hakverdioğlu's count of the cönk, this is Dertli's only poem in aruz in the collection. Writing in aruz was common among nineteenth-century minstrels, and according to the TDV article Dertli too composed poems in both aruz and syllabic metre, though his real achievement lies in syllabic verse. The attribution rests on the record in the cönk and on Hakverdioğlu's reference. The poet's life and his link with Amasya are in the article Dertli.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

  • Mehmet Arslan, Mehtap Doğan, Kerbelâ Mersiyeleri, Ankara: Grafiker Yayınları, 2009, p. 218 (as cited by Hakverdioğlu 2019).

Online sources