Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Salup dil fülkini ʿummâna ḳıldum varumı ber-bâd
Muḫâlif rûzgâr olursa olsun her çi badâbâd

In English

1. Launching the ship of my heart on the ocean, I gave all I had to the wind; if the wind blows contrary, let it blow, come what may.

Literary and Historical Commentary

An image drawn from sea voyages is carried here to its end. The heart is a ship (fülk), and the lover has launched it on the "ummân", the ocean. He has made everything he had "ber-bâd"; the word is the origin of the modern Turkish "berbat" and means given to the wind, ruined. The recklessness goes on in the second line: if the wind, that is fortune, blows contrary, let it blow. The last word "bâdâbâd" is Persian for "come what may"; it too contains "bâd", the word for wind.

Three words of the couplet, ber-bâd, rûzgâr and bâdâbâd, thus carry the same idea of wind in different senses. "Bâdâbâd" also passed into Turkish as a sailors' expression and describes plunging into danger with open eyes. The couplet appears in both Âşık Çelebi and Kınalızâde. Kınalızâde reads the first line "var mı bir bâd" and slightly changes the sense: "I launched the ship of my heart on the ocean; is there a wind?" Kılıç's critical apparatus records that the couplet is missing from manuscript A of the anthology. This is Ehlî's only image drawn from the sea, and given a life that ended on an island as molla of Rhodes it may strike the reader as apt; but the couplet was written before 1568 and there is no ground for such a link.

Bibliography

Online sources