Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefā‘ilün Fe‘ilātün Mefā‘ilün Fe‘ilün

Yüzüñ görem diyu idüp seḥerde secde-i ḫāṣ
Güneş ṭoġınca oḳudum hezār kez “ İḫlāṣ ”
Seni görenleri el-ḳıṣṣa sevmezem hergiz
Mes̱el durur buña el-ḳāṣṣü lā-yüḥübbü’l-ḳāṣ
Revā mıdur dökesin ḳanumı benüm nā-ḥaḳ
Meger żamīrüñe gelmez ki el-cerūḥ-ı ḳıṣāṣ
Esīr-i çāh-ı ẕeḳan olmış idi mücrim dil
Ḫaṭuñ irişüp o miskīni andan itdi ḫalāṣ
Çıḳardı ḳıymeti cevher durur kenāre şehā
Olalı Fażlī-i baḥḥār me‘āniye ġavvāṣ

In English

1. That I might see your face, I made a special prostration at dawn, and when the sun rose I recited the sura of İhlâs (Sincerity) a thousand times.

2. In short, I never love those who look at you; the proverb fits this: "The storyteller does not love the storyteller."

3. Is it right that you shed my blood unjustly? Or does the saying "for wounds there is retaliation" never come to your mind?

4. The guilty heart had fallen captive in the well of your dimpled chin; the down of your cheek arrived and rescued the poor thing from there.

5. O king, since Fazlî the seafarer became a diver into meanings, the jewel has gained value and lies on the shore. (The couplet can be read in two ways: either the value of the jewel has risen through the pearls of meaning Fazlî has brought up and it is spread out on the shore, or beside these pearls the ordinary jewel has lost its worth and been left aside.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a ghazal (gazel) of five couplets, written in the "mefā‘ilün fe‘ilātün mefā‘ilün fe‘ilün" pattern of the müctes family of aruz (quantitative metre). It has no redif (refrain word); the rhyme is formed by the sound "-āṣ" in the words "ḫāṣ, İḫlāṣ, ḳāṣ, ḳıṣāṣ, ḫalāṣ, ġavvāṣ", and Özkat counts this ghazal among those with rich rhyme. The pen name (mahlas) appears in the last couplet. The ghazal is the hundred and second in Özkat's edition and is found in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 243b) of the miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. It is not known to whom or when it was written.

The second line of the second couplet is in two parts in the edition: the words "Mes̱el durur buña" are given in transcription, while the Arabic proverb that follows is printed in Arabic script. In a footnote Özkat gives the reading of this Arabic phrase as "el-ḳāṣṣü lā-yüḥübbü'l-ḳāṣ" and its meaning as "The storyteller does not love the storyteller"; the line in the original text has been established according to this footnote. Özkat also cites the same couplet among the proverbs and Arabic expressions found in Fazlî's poems.

On fol. 66b of the miscellany numbered Âşir Efendi 314 in the Süleymaniye Library, immediately after the masnavi Gül ü Bülbül, the copyist recorded two couplets, which Özkat quotes in his description of the manuscripts: "Seni sevenleri el ḳıṣṣa sevmezem hergiz / Mes̱el dürür bu ki el ḳıṣṣa lā-yuḥibbü'l-ḥāṣṣ" and "Çıḳardı ḳıymeti cevher dürür kenāre şehā / Biḥār-ı naẓma dil-i Fażli olalı ġavvāṣ". That these two couplets are variant wordings of the second and fifth couplets of this ghazal is our own observation. In the miscellany the first line says "those who love you" instead of "those who look at you"; the last line has "since Fazlî's heart became a diver in the seas of poetry" instead of "since Fazlî the seafarer became a diver into meanings", which sheds some light on the obscure sense of the fifth couplet.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

In the opening couplet there is an implicit comparison between the beloved's face and the sun: the lover prostrates himself at dawn to see the face and recites İhlâs a thousand times when the sun rises. The word "İhlâs" is both the name of the sura in the Qur'an and a word meaning sincerity; the lover's prayer carries both senses at once, and this double entendre (tevriye) is our own observation. In the second couplet the lover counts everyone who looks at the beloved as a rival and grounds this jealousy in an Arabic proverb: two people who practise the same trade do not love each other. The closeness of sound between "el-ḳıṣṣa" (in short) in the couplet and "el-ḳāṣṣ" (the storyteller) in the proverb is also our own observation.

The phrase "el-cerūḥ-ı ḳıṣāṣ" in the third couplet rests on the legal principle that retaliation applies to wounds; that it recalls the words "ve'l-cürûḥa ḳıṣāṣ" in the sura of al-Mâ'ida is our own observation. By reminding the beloved who sheds his blood unjustly of this ruling, the lover calls him to account in a half-joking manner. The fourth couplet uses the well-known image of divan poetry, the well of the chin: the heart is a prisoner fallen into the dimple of the beloved's chin. The down that frames the cheek rescues it like a rope let down into the well; this comparison with a rope is our own inference. In the last couplet the words sea, diver, jewel and shore form a congruence of images (tenasüp); the poet presents himself as a diver who plunges into the sea of meaning and brings up pearls.

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. 344, ghazal no. 102 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 243b); also p. 69 (rhyme), pp. 89 and 107 (proverbs and Arabic elements) and p. 118 (the couplets in the Âşir Efendi 314 miscellany), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources