Original Ottoman Turkish Text

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

Gösterüp dīnār yāre ṣoḥbete meyyāl ider
Muṭrib anuñ-çün defüñ her laḥẓa arḳasın yeper
Sūzen-i ġamzeñle cānā rişte-i zülfüñ durur
Şehr-i ġurbetde bu ben āvāreye ipler çeker

In English

1. (The rival) shows gold coins to the beloved and draws him to his company; that is why the musician strokes the back of his tambourine every moment.

2. O my soul, the thread of your tress, threaded on the needle of your glance, hauls me, this vagabond, onto the rope in the city of exile.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The text we have consists of two couplets, written in the "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün" pattern of the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre). It has no redif; Özkat counts this ghazal among those with half rhyme. The rhyme is formed by the sound "-er" in the words "ider, yeper, çeker". The ghazal is the ninety-sixth in Özkat's edition and is found only in the Fazlî divan section (fol. 238b) 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 last couplets are missing; what remains to us is the opening couplet and one more. 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 opening couplet is one that Özkat interprets at some length among the traces of social life in Fazlî's poems. According to Özkat, the poet here points to a behaviour often met with in places of entertainment: the rival shows the beloved gold coins in order to draw him into his company; that is why the musician strokes the back of his tambourine every moment. Özkat says that those who have no quality other than their wealth make a display of it to catch the attention of the beauty they have their eye on, and that the musicians, who have already discovered this wealth through the tips they receive, reckon up the tip and stroke the backs of their tambourines with joy. In his view the poet has tied to a pleasing cause the musician's action of trying to warm the skin of the tambourine, perhaps in order to get a better sound. To attribute an event to a pleasing cause other than its real one is the figure of fanciful aetiology (hüsn-i ta‘lîl). Özkat cites the verb "yepmek" (yepemek) in the couplet among the words whose roots go back to the earlier periods of Turkish, meaning "to stroke".

The second couplet uses images of sewing: the "sūzen" (needle) is the glance, the "rişte" (thread) is the tress. The thread of the tress, threaded on the needle of the glance, "hauls onto the rope" the lover in the city of exile. Özkat cites this couplet as an example of the idiom "ipe çekmek" (to haul onto the rope); the idiom means to hang someone. The congruence of images (tenasüp) between needle, thread and rope sets the literal and figurative meanings of the idiom working together; this is our own observation.

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. 341, ghazal no. 96 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 238b); also p. 62 (incomplete ghazals), p. 69 (rhyme), p. 81 (social life), p. 92 (idioms), p. 105 (old Turkish words) and pp. 119-120 (description of the manuscripts), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources