Original Ottoman Turkish Text

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

Ḳādir olsam tende yüz biñ dīde peydā eylesem
Ḥüsnüñi anuñla her laḥẓa temāşā eylesem

In English

1. Were I able, I would bring forth a hundred thousand eyes in my body and with them gaze upon your beauty every moment.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text before us is a single couplet written in the "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün" pattern of the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre). Özkat gathers Fazlî's couplets found in the biographical anthologies of poets (tezkire) at the end of the ghazal section, under the heading "Couplets Appearing Independently in the Tezkires"; according to Özkat the fourteen fragments under this heading amount to twenty couplets. This couplet is numbered as ghazal a hundred and forty-one in that section and is taken from Latîfî's tezkire (p. 435). The redif (refrain word) is "eylesem" and the rhyme words are "peydā / temāşā"; Özkat counts this fragment among the poems with a Turkish word as redif. Since both its lines rhyme, the couplet is probably the opening couplet (matla) of a lost ghazal; this is our own inference. The rest of the ghazal, and to whom and when it was written, are not known.

Latîfî is one of the two writers of tezkires who report that Fazlî had a divan; as Özkat reports, he presents him as a poet with a great many poems, the author of a book and a divan. Other pieces by Fazlî also come from this tezkire: part of ghazal a hundred and thirty-five and the fragment numbered a hundred and forty are couplets chosen by Latîfî. Most of Fazlî's ghazals that have come down complete are of five couplets; according to Özkat, eighty-three of the hundred and twenty-four complete ghazals are of this length. The length of the ghazal to which this lone couplet belonged, however, is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet rests on a hyperbole which says that two eyes are not enough to gaze upon the beloved's beauty. The lover wishes, if he could, to create a hundred thousand eyes all over his body; thus he would not be parted from the beloved's face for a single moment. The phrases at the ends of the lines, "peydā eylesem" (would that I brought forth) and "temāşā eylesem" (would that I gazed), are two wishes built with the same verb, and one is the reason for the other: the eyes are to be created for gazing. The couplet opens with the condition "ḳādir olsam" (were I able); that bringing forth a hundred thousand eyes is beyond human power makes the impossibility of the wish plain from the start. This interpretation is our own. There is a congruence of images (tenasüp) between the words "dīde" (eye), "temāşā" (gazing) and "laḥẓa" (moment; originally a glance from the corner of the eye); this observation too is our own. Given that in divan poetry gazing upon the beloved is treated as the lover's greatest desire, the couplet is a plain expression that carries this desire to its furthest limit.

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. 369, ghazal no. 141 (Latîfî's tezkire, p. 435); also p. 21 (Latîfî's note on the divan), p. 62 (the couplets in the tezkires and the complete ghazals) and p. 69 (redifs), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.
  • Latîfî, Tezkiretü'ş-Şu'arâ ve Tabsıratü'n-Nuzamâ, ed. Rıdvan Canım, AKM, Ankara 2000, p. 435 (as cited by Özkat).

Online sources