Arzu Ballar's name appears only once in the fifteen years of the Ankara State Conservatory's field recordings, on the card of this deyiş. The catalogue's list of performers can give a single fact about the singer: home was central Amasya. The year of birth and occupation were left blank on the card, and even the place and date of the recording were filled in later. The surviving line, "Gönül der ki ben de gördüm gönülü", is thus the only trace of an almost anonymous voice.

Catalogue Data

  • Repertoire no.: none; it does not appear in the Amasya section of the TRT repertoire
  • Source person: Arzu Ballar, from central Amasya; age and occupation not recorded
  • Place and date of collection: Amasya, 6 July 1943; both in square brackets in the catalogue, determined from the course of the journey
  • Collected by: the conservatory team of Halil Bedii Yönetken, Muzaffer Sarısözen and Rıza Yetişen
  • Genre: deyiş (devotional song)
  • Mode, rhythm: unknown
  • Words and music: recorded as anonymous
  • Location in the archive: Folklore Archive of the former Ankara State Conservatory, disc 1115/A-2
  • Source publication: Kaya's catalogue, no. 3629, the thesis in the İTÜ repository; there is no TRT link

Lyrics

Gönül der ki ben de gördüm gönülü

The speaker in the line is the heart: "I too have seen the heart," it says. The word turning back on itself, as if one heart recognised itself in another, is open to a Sufi reading; it can also be understood as the words of a lover who has seen into the beloved's heart. Which of the two is right cannot be settled without the rest of the deyiş. No publication gives the rest of the deyiş or its notation; Arzu Ballar's voice is on disc 1115, in the archive handed over to the State Conservatory of Hacettepe University.

Story

The card carries no poet's name. Whom the deyiş belongs to, where Arzu Ballar learned it and in what setting it was sung therefore remain in the dark, and no account of its origin has been published.

Musical Features

The disc number of the recording raises a question. In the catalogue the very next entry, "Elif (Nefes)", sung by Şükrü Topçu, is written with the same side number but with a question mark beside it, "1115/A-2 (?)"; among its performers appears the name of Muzaffer Sarısözen, a member of the team himself. Whether the two pieces stand one after the other on the same side, or whether one of the numbers was written on the card by mistake, cannot be learned from the catalogue. Mode, rhythm and range, for their part, have not been published.

Performers and Recordings

This is Arzu Ballar's only known recording. Disc 1115 gathers the recordings of 6 July, the day the team returned to Amasya: on side A a bozlak by a singer named Hüseyin and this deyiş; on side B Mehmet Kemeroğlu's song, which entered the TRT repertoire as Evleri Görünüyor, followed by Zekeriya Demiray's "Dımbıla Gız" and Bayatı (Atüstü Bayatı). A collective account of the deyiş, folk songs and long songs collected in Amasya is in The Melody of Yeşilırmak.

Bibliography

Online sources