Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Alur göñlini ele aġyâruñ ol yâr
Dimez kim ʿâşıḳuñ da ḫâṭırı var

In English

1. That beloved wins over the hearts of the rivals; it does not occur to her that the lover too has feelings to be considered.

Literary and Historical Commentary

This couplet in a short metre voices one of the most familiar complaints of divan poetry with two everyday idioms. "Gönlünü ele almak" is to please someone, to win them over; to say "hatırı var" is to say that someone too has a worth, a sensitivity that must be respected. The beloved wins over the hearts of the ağyâr, the rivals, but never stops to think that the lover too has feelings.

The wordplay in the couplet rests on the word "el": the el (hand) in the idiom "ele almak" gains a second sense because the rivals themselves are counted as "el", strangers. The heart has been given to strangers. Since both lines rhyme, on "yâr" and "var", the couplet reads as a matla. Of the pieces Âşık Çelebi chose it is the plainest in language and leans more on speech than on ornament. The lines are about eleven or twelve syllables long; beside the fifteen- and sixteen-syllable lines of Ehlî's other couplets this brevity makes the saying easy to remember, like a proverb. No source other than Âşık Çelebi's anthology has it.

Bibliography

Online sources