Firâkî is a poet with a single ghazal recorded in the Merzifon Cönkü. The article Metin Hakverdioğlu published in 2019 gives only the opening couplet of this ghazal and no information about the poet. Among the known poets who used the pen name Firâkî is a sixteenth-century divan poet from Kütahya; but no record has been found linking the ghazal in the cönk to him or to any other Firâkî. The poet's identity, the place where he lived and his century are unknown.

The Poem in the Merzifon Cönkü

The ghazal on page 108 of the cönk begins with the line "Coşdı göňlüm sel gibi çağlar o yâriň semtine". In the couplet the surging heart is likened to an unstoppable flood; a love lasting night and day binds the lover to the beloved's side. Its language is plain, and its rhyme ("çağlar / bağlar") is close to popular speech. The article published only the opening couplet of this poem; the couplet is given on a separate page in this category, with its original text, a modern Turkish rendering and commentary. The full text of the ghazal is in the cönk itself and has not been published.

Connection with Amasya

Firâkî's only known connection with Amasya is that his ghazal appears in this cönk, which is thought to have been compiled in Merzifon. Hakverdioğlu obtained the cönk from Merzifon and has argued that it was compiled by a poet from the literary circle of Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon, most probably Fethî.

State of the Sources and Discussion

The article contains two different pieces of information about Firâkî. In the section listing the poets of the cönk and the number of their poems it says "Firâkî 1 hece" (one poem in syllabic metre); in the section where the poems are given, however, the heading is "Firâkî's poems written in aruz", and the poem given is an aruz ghazal. Since the poem itself is written in aruz, the second statement has been followed.

According to M. Fatih Köksal's entry in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, the real name of Firâkî of Kütahya was Abdurrahman; he was one of the poets of the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, worked as a preacher and translated Kâşifî's Ahlâk-ı Muhsinî into Turkish; five different dates between 1572-73 and 1585 are given for his death. Âşık Çelebi writes that he had many ghazals and was particularly successful in ribald verse (hezl); his ghazals entered various anthologies of response poems. The conversational manner of the ghazal in the cönk, and the cönk's general emphasis on folk poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggest that this ghazal may belong to a much later period than Firâkî of Kütahya. On the other hand, since the cönk also contains poems by the sixteenth-century poet Bâkî, it is not impossible that a ghazal by an older divan poet was taken into it. This question cannot be resolved without seeing the full text of the ghazal and its signature couplet.

Bibliography

Online sources