Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef‘ūlü Mefā‘īlü Mefā‘īlü Fe‘ūlün

‘Āşıḳlaruñ eyler ṣanemā ‘aḳlını yaġma
Bu ḥüsn ile bu ḳāmet ü bu şekl ü bu sīmā
Ben ḫaste-dile leblerüñ emdür didüm ol yār
Ṣunup lebin aġzuma didi dişleme ammā
Ṣu yirine ḳan içmedür ol ḫūniye ḳānūn
Ḳan rengini ṭutsa n’ola çeşmümden aḳan mā

In English

1. O idol, with this beauty, this stature, this form and this face you plunder the reason of lovers.

2. I, the sick-hearted, said to that beloved, "your lips are medicine to me"; holding his lip to my mouth he said, "but do not bite". (The word "em" in the couplet can be read both as "medicine" and as the imperative of the verb "emmek", "suck".)

3. The law of that bloodthirsty one is to drink blood instead of water; is it any wonder if the water flowing from my eye takes on the colour of blood?

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text that survives consists of three couplets, written in the "mef‘ūlü mefā‘īlü mefā‘īlü fe‘ūlün" pattern of the hezec family of aruz (quantitative metre). It has no redif; Özkat counts this ghazal among those with rich rhyme. The rhyme is formed by the sound "-mā/-ma" at the end of the words "yaġma, sīmā, ammā, aḳan mā"; the last rhyme, "aḳan mā" (flowing water), is made of two words. The ghazal is the forty-second in Özkat's edition; Özkat places it in the group of incomplete ghazals rhyming in alif "whose last couplets are missing", and so the closing couplet with the pen name (mahlas) has not survived. The text is found only in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 248b) of the miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. 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. This ghazal is one of them, and Özkat records it as three couplets.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

In the first couplet the fourfold repetition of the demonstrative "bu" (this) counts out the beloved's beauty as if pointing at it with a finger: this beauty, this stature, this form, this face. The figure of repetition (tekrir) is joined to a simplicity close to the spoken language; the word "yaġma" (plunder) presents the beloved as a raider who plunders the reason of lovers. The second couplet is the wittiest in the ghazal and reports a short exchange between beloved and lover. The lover calls the beloved's lips "em"; in Old Turkish "em" means medicine, but the same sound can also be read as the imperative of the verb "emmek" (to suck). As if taking this second sense, the beloved holds his lip to the lover's mouth and says, "but do not bite". Thus the double entendre (tevriye) becomes a scene.

In the third couplet the beloved is called "ḫūnī", the bloodthirsty one; his law is to drink blood instead of water. That the tears flowing from the lover's eye take on the colour of blood is explained by this law: where the beloved's rule holds, even water turns to blood. The word "mā" in the rhyme means "water" in Arabic and repeats the sense of the Turkish "ṣu" at the beginning of the line. There is also a closeness of sound between the words "ḳan" (blood) and "ḳānūn" (law).

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. 308, ghazal no. 42 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 248b); also pp. 61-62 (incomplete ghazals), p. 69 (rhyme) and pp. 119-120 (description of the manuscripts), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources