Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fā‘ilātün Fā‘ilātün Fā‘ilātün Fā‘ilün

Ḳo ṣalayın boynuña ḳolum nihāyet diyeler
Boynına bir şāh altundan ḥamāyil baġlamış
Ḳaşlaruñ iki muḳavves ṭāḳdur k’üstād-ı ṣun‘
Ḥüsnüñ eyvānına ol ṭākı muḳābil baġlamış
İrmediler menzil-i Leylā’ya hergiz gerçi kim
Niçe Mecnūn vādi-i ‘ışḳ içre maḥmil baġlamış
Ḳaldı ḫaṭṭuñ nüsḫası hergiz beyāża çıḳmadı
Gerçi vaṣfında anuñ Fażlī resāyil baġlamış

In English

1. Let me cast (my arm) about your neck; so that at last (those who see it) may say, "A king has tied a golden amulet (hamail) about his neck." (The manuscript reads "is of gold" instead of "of gold".)

2. Your eyebrows are two vaulted arches; the master of creation (God) has set them facing each other in the iwan of your beauty.

3. Though many a Majnun has loaded his litter (set out on the road) in the valley of love, they never reached the dwelling of Leyla.

4. The copy of the down on your cheek (your script) has never been made fair (written out clean); and yet Fazlî has composed treatises in its praise.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text we have consists of four couplets, written in the "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün" pattern of the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre). The redif (refrain word) is the word "baġlamış" (has tied); Özkat counts this ghazal among those with a Turkish word redif. The rhyme is formed by the sound "-il" in the words "ḥamāyil, muḳābil, maḥmil, resāyil". The pen name (mahlas) appears in the last couplet. The ghazal is the hundredth in Özkat's edition and is found only in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 243a) of the miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. Özkat gives it under the heading "incomplete ghazals rhyming in the letter şın", among those whose first couplets are missing; the first couplet we have is not the opening couplet, and its lines do not rhyme. In the manuscript the second line of the first couplet reads "altundur" (is of gold) instead of "altundan" (of gold). It is not known to whom or when it was written.

In the ghazal section of the divan, Özkat gathers the ghazals whose beginning or end is missing because of lost pages into a separate group at the end of the letter in which they rhyme, and notes that these ghazals were not left unfinished by the poet but owe their state to missing pages in the miscellanies. According to him, among the 153 poems of the ghazal section there are 15 ghazals that could not be recovered in full because of lost or torn-out leaves.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first couplet we have is one that Özkat interprets among the customs reflected in Fazlî's poems. According to Özkat, the poet, who wants to wind his arm round the beloved's neck, finds a pretext for this behaviour, which would have been considered shameful in that age: "let them say a king has tied a golden hamail about his neck". As Özkat explains, hamail is an Arabic word meaning "amulet" and "sword belt"; among the people it is called "hamaylı", and in the past it was carried round the neck in a case of silver or leather. Because it is a talisman, in classical Turkish poetry the hair falling on the beloved's neck is described as a hamail, and likewise the arm of the lover who wants to wind himself round the beloved's neck takes the place of a hamail. That the lover's arm should be "of gold" may be explained by the convention in divan poetry of likening the lover's yellowed body to the colour of gold; this is our own interpretation.

The redif of the ghazal, "baġlamış", is used in a different sense in each couplet: tying an amulet, building an arch, binding a litter on a camel and setting out, and composing a treatise. This variety of meaning is our own observation. In the second couplet the eyebrows are likened to two arches set facing each other in architecture; the words "ṭāḳ" (arch), "eyvān" (iwan, vaulted hall) and "üstād" (master builder) build up a world of architecture. In the third couplet there is an allusion to the story of Leyla and Majnun: the "maḥmil" is the litter bound on a camel's back that carries the traveller; many a Majnun has set out in the desert of love and failed to reach Leyla's dwelling. In the last couplet the word "ḫaṭ" means both script and the down on the cheek; the words "nüsḫa" (copy), "beyāża çıkmak" (to make a fair copy of a draft) and "resāyil" (treatises) form a congruence of images (tenasüp) from the scribe's world. That the black down "has never come out white" describes both a copy never made fair and its colour; this double entendre (tevriye) is our own observation.

Bibliography

  • Mustafa Özkat, Kara Fazlî'nin Hayatı, Eserleri, Edebî Kişiliği ve Dîvânı (İnceleme-Tenkitli Metin), MA thesis, Marmara University Institute of Turkic Studies, Istanbul 2005, p. 343, ghazal no. 100 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 243a); also p. 62 (incomplete ghazals), p. 69 (redifs), pp. 80-81 (the custom of the hamail) and pp. 119-120 (description of the manuscripts), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources