Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Sûziş-i derd-i derûnu nice tabîe edelim
Kaleme gelmez o kim safhaya tahrîr edelim
Bulmada neşv ü nemâ şiddeti hummâ-yı gamun
Habb-ı sabr ile gel ey dil ana tedbîr edelim
Fehmi güç sûre-i ebrûları ince ma'nâ
Müteşâbihdir ol âyet nice tefsîr edelim

In English

1. How shall we put into words the burning of the pain within (the word "tabîe" must be "ta'bîr", expression, as the rhyme requires); it does not yield to the pen that we might write it on the page.

2. The fever of grief keeps growing in strength; come, O heart, let us treat it with the pill of patience.

3. The sura of her eyebrows is hard to understand, a subtle meaning; that verse is müteşâbih (of hidden meaning), how shall we interpret it.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The Place of One Word

The redif of the fragment is "edelim", "let us", and the rhyme is the sound "-îr": "tahrîr, tedbîr, tefsîr". The word "tabîe" in the first line of the opening couplet does not fit this series and gives no meaning. Both rhyme and sense call for "ta'bîr": how shall we express, how shall we tell the burning of the pain. The rendering rests on this reading; since the source makes no such correction, the text has been left as it stands. The fragment has three couplets and no pen-name couplet; it appears among the samples in İsmail Hakkı Aksoyak's dictionary article without a separate statement of its source.

Pen, Medicine and Verse

Each couplet is built from a vocabulary of its own. The first uses the language of writing: pen, page, inscription. The pain burns so fiercely that it cannot be put into writing. The second moves to the physician's language: "hummâ" fever, "habb" pill, "tedbîr" treatment. The word "sabr" here has two meanings: patience, and aloe, a bitter plant used as a medicine. So "the pill of patience" names both a real remedy and the lover's only cure; this double entendre (tevriye) is the most delicate point of the couplet.

The third couplet opens onto a world one might expect in the verse of a mufti and madrasa professor, the sciences of the Qur'an. The beloved's eyebrows are a "sura", since they recall the curved letters of script and the sura headings on the page of a Qur'an. The meaning of this sura is subtle and hard to grasp. Verses of the Qur'an whose meaning is not plain and which are open to more than one interpretation are called "müteşâbih", and scholars interpret them with caution. By likening the sign of the eyebrow to such a verse, the poet says he cannot make out what it means. Information on the author of these couplets, a madrasa professor and mufti, is found on the page Eşref Abdurrahman Efendi of Merzifon.

Bibliography

Online sources