Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

Burnunu her şeye sokdukda kokuttun âlemi
Bok karıştırmakta ördekler sana hayrân olur

In English

1. Each time you poked your nose into everything you made the whole world stink; even ducks would admire you at stirring up filth.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The couplet is the only piece surviving from a long satire that Hilmî wrote about his rival Hacı Bayramzâde Sıdkı Efendi. Hüsameddin does not give the whole satire; he records only this couplet, which was "elsine-i âmmede pek meşhûr", very famous on the tongues of the people. The metre fits the pattern "fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün"; the identification is ours. The second line's ending "hayrân olur" suggests that the satire may have been written as a ghazal or kaside with the redif "olur" and the rhyme "-ân"; this is a guess. The text is given without altering the blunt words of the source.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet uses the coarse but effective diction of satire, close to popular speech. In the first line the idiom "to poke one's nose into everything" describes a meddler; the poet also draws the idiom towards its literal sense and joins it with the smell coming from the places the nose is poked into, saying that the affairs the man meddles in have made the whole world stink. The second line makes the image still more concrete: the duck, which searches for food by thrusting its bill into mud and filth, refers through the verb "karıştırmak" (to stir, to stir up trouble) both to this habit of the duck and to the man who stirs up discord. That even the ducks admire him is a mockery built through hyperbole.

This play moving between the figurative and literal senses of an idiom is a method favoured by divan satire. Hilmî's making his rival ridiculous in a short and memorable couplet also explains how the couplet spread among the people. Hüsameddin's description of him as "nekre-gû", a wit, is plainly seen in this couplet.

Historical Context

According to Hüsameddin, the occasion of the satire was Sıdkı Efendi's involvement in the uproar over determining the start of the Feast of the Sacrifice in the year 1318, for which he was arrested. The Feast of the Sacrifice of 1318 fell in the spring of 1901. Since in the lunar calendar the day on which the feast begins depends on the sighting of the new moon, disputes of this kind were frequent in the towns; the details of the incident are not given in the source. Hüsameddin also records that Hilmî's verse contests and exchanges of satire with Sıdkı Efendi were well known. Sıdkı Efendi is probably the same person as Bayramzâde Yusuf Sıdkî Hoca, who gathered the poems of the Merzifon poet Eyüb Sabrî into a divan in 1893; this is an inference. For the poet's life see the article Dedezâde Mehmed Hilmî Efendi.

Bibliography

Online sources