Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün

Dönerken birbirinüñ üstine eflāk iy māhum
Girüp birbirine ḫūrşīd ḥüsnüñ-çün nizā‘ eyler

In English

1. O my moon, as the spheres revolve one upon another, the sun, falling to strife, contends for your beauty. (The subject of "birbirine girüp" (falling upon one another) is not clear; it appears that the revolving of the spheres and the sun is likened to a fight for the sake of beauty.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text before us is a single couplet written in the "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün" pattern of the hezec 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-nine in that section and is taken from the tezkire of Kâfzâde Fâizî; as Özkat reports, Kâfzâde says that he copied the couplets after seeing Fazlî's divan. There is no rhyme between the lines ("māhum / eyler"); Özkat counts this couplet among the eight fragments surviving as single couplets. It is not known to whom or when it was written.

According to Özkat, Kâfzâde repeats almost word for word the information given by Riyâzî about Fazlî's death, namely that the poet died in 971 and that Gelibolulu Âlî composed a chronogram on his death with the words "Fażlī öldi" (Fazlî has died). 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 finds a poetic cause for the revolving of the heavens. In the old view of the heavens the spheres are thought of as layers nested one inside another, each turning in its own orbit; the poet likens this orderly turning to a jostling scuffle. As the spheres revolve one upon another, the sun too has fallen into strife with them and is contending for the beloved's beauty. Putting a fine cause in place of the real one is the figure called hüsn-i talil (poetic aetiology). The beloved is addressed as "māhum" (my moon); thus the moon, the sun and the spheres come together in the same couplet and a congruence of images (tenasüp) is formed among them. That all the heavenly bodies compete to reach a moon on earth, that is, the beloved, is a hyperbole saying that her beauty sets even the heavens in motion. The use of the idiom "birbirine girmek" (to fall upon one another) in the sense of coming to blows gives the couplet a liveliness drawn from everyday speech. These observations are our own. The possessive suffix in the address "māhum" (my moon) makes the beloved the lover's own moon: while the heavenly bodies contend for her, the moon belongs to the lover. This interpretation too is our own.

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. 371, ghazal no. 149 (Kâfzâde Fâizî's tezkire); also p. 21 (Kâfzâde's notes on the divan and the poet's death), p. 62 (the couplets in the tezkires and the complete ghazals) and p. 69 (single-couplet fragments), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.
  • Kâfzâde Fâizî, Zübdetü'l-Eş'âr, manuscript, Millet Library, Ali Emîrî Collection no. 1325 (as cited by Özkat).

Online sources