Original Ottoman Turkish Text

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

İtlerüñle ḫᵛāba varmış ṣaḥn-ı kūyuñda göñül
Gūyiyā gülşende yatmış bir nice yārān uyur
Nā-tüvān olsa n’ola bīmār-ı çeşmüñ her zemān
Mest olup yatur güneşde iy meh-i tābān uyur
Cān revān eyler yüzüñ gördükçe Fażlī şevḳle
Ḫaṭṭ ider her kim seḥer iy ḫüsrev-i ḫūbān uyur

In English

1. The heart has fallen asleep with your dogs in the courtyard of your street; it is as if a few friends were lying asleep in a rose garden.

2. What wonder if your sick eye is always languid? O shining moon, (that eye) lies drunk in the sun (on your sun-like face) and sleeps.

3. O sovereign of the fair ones, Fazlî gives up his soul with longing whenever he sees your face; whoever sleeps at dawn does wrong. (The words "ḫaṭṭ ider" are understood here with the reading "ḫaṭā ider", does wrong; the reading is conjectural.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text we have consists of three 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 verb "uyur" (sleeps); Özkat counts this ghazal among those with a Turkish word redif. The rhyme is formed by the sound "-ān" in the words "yārān, tābān, ḫūbān". The pen name (mahlas) appears in the last couplet. The ghazal is the ninety-fourth in Özkat's edition and is found only in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 239a) 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 rā", among those whose first couplets are missing; the opening couplet has not come down to us. 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 redif of the ghazal is about sleep, and each couplet sets a scene of sleeping. In the first couplet the lover's heart sleeps together with the dogs in the beloved's street. To be the companion of the dogs at the beloved's door is a familiar image in divan poetry expressing the lover's humility; the couplet "Dirlügüm it dirlügidür itlerinsüz Fażliyā", which Özkat cites among his examples of plain expression, uses the same image. The lover likens sleeping with the dogs to the state of friends asleep in a rose garden; the comparison draws its force both from the place being the beloved's street and from the dogs being called "yārān" (friends).

In the second couplet the beloved's eye is thought of as sick, languid and drunk; these are familiar epithets for the eye of the beauty in divan poetry. The eye "lies in the sun", because the beloved's face is likened to the sun; the eye sleeps upon this sun. This reading is our own observation. In the last couplet the hour of dawn is important: dawn is known as the hour at which lovers do not sleep but remember the beloved and pray. We have read the words "ḫaṭṭ ider" at the beginning of the second line as "ḫaṭā ider" (does wrong); the word "ḫaṭṭ" also means writing and the down on the cheek, and there may be another relation of meaning in the couplet. This reading is conjectural.

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. 340, ghazal no. 94 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 239a); also p. 62 (incomplete ghazals), p. 69 (redifs), p. 103 (plain expression) and pp. 119-120 (description of the manuscripts), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources