Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Âteş-i ‘aşḳıyla yanıp aġlarken
Yandı ciger şimdi göz göz oldı gel
Nehr-i Ceyhûn gibi ṭurmaz çaġlarken
Ṭolġa boyum aşup düpdüz oldı gel

In English

1. While I burned and wept in the fire of love for her, my heart burned and now it is riddled with holes; come. While my tears flow without stopping like the river Ceyhun... The last line cannot be understood with certainty: if the word "Ṭolġa" is read in the sense of "wave", the wave rose above my height and all became flat (sank under the flood); come. This reading is ours.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The quatrain is the first stanza of the koşma on page 114 of the Merzifon Cönkü; in the article it is printed split across two pages. The rest of the koşma is unpublished. The lines have eleven syllables each. The first and third lines rhyme in "aġlarken" and "çaġlarken". The second and fourth lines end with the refrain "oldı gel"; the rhyme rests on the "-z" sound in "göz göz" and "düpdüz". The word "Ṭolġa" at the beginning of the fourth line is given unchanged as read in the article; the context and the Ceyhun simile suggest that it may have been used in the sense of "wave", but this interpretation is not certain.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain uses two great elements of love together, fire and water. In the first two lines the lover burns and weeps in the fire of love; his heart has burned and become "göz göz", riddled with holes. The doublet "göz göz" describes the holes that open in something burnt, while also recalling the word "göz", the weeping eye; this play of sound adds a quiet depth to the quatrain. In the third line the tears are likened to the "nehr-i Ceyhûn", the great Ceyhun (Oxus) river of Central Asia. The Ceyhun is an image of hyperbole often used in Turkish and Persian poetry to express an abundance of tears. The fourth line seems to say that this flood rose above the lover's height and levelled everything. That both lines end with "gel", come, brings to the fore a short and insistent call to the beloved at the end of all this pain.

Historical Context

Nothing is known of Fethî's life. Metin Hakverdioğlu believes that he was a Merzifon poet and that it is highly likely he compiled the cönk; the main ground for this view is that in two of his koşmas the poet addresses a beauty named Gülfadik in "Şehr-i Merzifon". Since the cönk is estimated to be about a hundred years old, Fethî probably lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; this too is not a firm date but a conclusion drawn from the estimated age of the cönk. What is known of the poet and of the cönk is set out in the biography of Fethî.

Bibliography

Online sources