Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Var eger ʿarż-ı ʿiẕâr eyleye gülzâra gele
Çâk ide ġonca girîbânın ü gül zâra gele

In English

1. Were the beloved to come to the rose garden to show her cheek, the rosebud would tear open its collar (out of envy), and the rose would fall to wailing. (In Latîfî's edition the line begins "Var eger"; the rendering follows the reading "Yâr eger" found in Kınalızâde, Hüsameddin and TEİS, since it completes the sense.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The rhyme hides a pun. "Gülzâra" in the first line and "gül zâra" in the second are the same in spelling and in sound but part company in meaning: the first is "to the rose garden," the second "the rose to wailing." In both lines the refrain word (redif) is "gele." The couplet is the opening couplet (matla) of a ghazal (gazel); the rest of the ghazal is unknown, and nothing records to whom or on what occasion it was composed. Latîfî gives it as the only example showing the worth of Hayâtî's verse, and Kınalızâde and Hüsameddin repeat the same opening couplet as the poet's only poem. None of the editions names the metre; that the couplet fits the remel pattern fâilâtün feilâtün feilâtün feilün is our own determination.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The idea on which the couplet rests is the rivalry that divan poetry sets up between the beloved and the rose. The rose is the emblem of beauty; the beloved's cheek, however, is redder and fresher than the rose. If the beloved came to the rose garden and showed her cheek, the flowers would be defeated by such beauty. The poet conveys this through two movements. The splitting of the opening bud is likened to the state of a lover, or a mourner, tearing open his collar. In divan poetry "çâk-ı girîbân," the tearing of the collar, is the sign of love's madness and of deep grief. To ascribe the bud's opening to such a tearing is to find a poetic cause for an ordinary natural event; the old rhetoric calls this fanciful aetiology (hüsn-i talil). The second movement is the rose falling to "zâr," to wailing. In the garden it is usually the nightingale that moans and laments; here the rose itself weeps, because the beauty of the cheek has overcome it. The pun between "gülzâr" and "gül zâr" is the real craft of the couplet. The tezkire writers do not say why they chose this opening couplet; that the pun most probably weighed in their choice is a guess drawn from the couplet itself, not from the sources.

Historical Context

The couplet appears in three sources with small differences. Rıdvan Canım's 2018 edition of Latîfî reads the first word as "Var" and the second line as "Çâk ide ġonca girîbânın ü gül zâra gele." In Kınalızâde the second line takes the form "Çâk ide yakasını gonçede gülzâra gele"; here the rhyming pun is lost and the same word is repeated in both lines. Hüsameddin, for his part, has "Çâk ede gonce yakasını ve gülzâra gele." That the opening couplet is given in Latîfî to Hayâtî of Merzifon, and in Kınalızâde and Hüsameddin to the Hayâtî who was Memâtî's brother, is one of the grounds of the debate over whether the two poets were the same person. The debate and the poet's life are treated in detail on the page Hayâtî Çelebi of Merzifon.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Books

Online sources