Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Getürmez ḫâme ġam sırrın beyâna
Ṣıġar mı baḥr-i ḳulzum nâvdâna

In English

1. The pen cannot bring the secret of grief into words; can the vast ocean fit into a gutter.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

Âşık Çelebi gives this couplet with "Ve lehu" (this too is his), immediately after Kâmî's preceding mesnevi couplet. Its two lines rhyme with each other in "beyâna / nâvdâna", and in this form it is a mesnevi couplet. It is very probable that it was taken from the lost Yûsuf u Züleyhâ, but Âşık Çelebi does not say so explicitly; the observation is ours. The couplet is absent from manuscript F of Âşık Çelebi's edition. The edition of the tezkire does not indicate the metre. In which section of the mesnevi it stood is unknown.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet builds the idea of "the inexpressible", common in divan poetry, through a comparison. The poet says that the secret of the grief within him is too great to be written with a pen, and proves it in the second line with a question: a vast sea cannot fit into the narrow gutter that drains the water from a roof. Since the answer to such a question is obvious, it serves as a statement and forms the figure of the rhetorical question (istifham) in the couplet. The phrase "baḥr-i ḳulzum" is the name of the Red Sea in old texts and is also used in the sense of a boundless sea. The vastness of the sea of grief is thus expressed through the image of the widest sea.

The real subtlety of the comparison lies in the likeness between pen and gutter. The old writing pen was made of reed and had the form of a hollow tube. Ink flows from the tip of this reed just as water flows from a gutter. By likening the pen to a gutter and grief to a sea, the poet makes the disproportion between them visible. The congruence of images (tenasüp) between pen, gutter, sea and the utterance of a secret binds the two lines of the couplet tightly together. This analysis is ours. In the context of the Joseph story the couplet could suit a section describing Jacob's grief after losing his son, or Zuleikha's pain of love.

Historical Context

According to Âşık Çelebi, Kâmî is Mehmed Çelebi, nephew of Şeyh Cemâl; he served as a judge and died in 952 (1545-46). His Yûsuf u Züleyhâ was lost after his death, and this couplet may be one of the few fragments surviving from the work. Whether this person is the same as the Kâmî mentioned by Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar in Prince Ahmed's Amasya circle is not certain. The details are in the article Kâmî (Prince Ahmed's Circle).

Bibliography

Online sources