Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fe‘ilātün Mefā‘ilün Fe‘ilün

Şimdi bir yılcadur egerçi ki gün
Vaṣl olursaḳ ziyāde kūteh olur
Rūz-ı vaṣl olsa ‘āşıḳa rūzı
Ṣubḥ-gāh olmadan şebān-geh olur

In English

1. True, the day is now as long as a year; but if we are united, it becomes very short.

2. Should the day of union fall to the lover's lot, that day turns to evening before morning has even come. (The word "rūzı" at the head of the second line can be read both as "its day" and as "rūzī", meaning one's portion or lot.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a kıt'a (fragment) of two couplets (beyit). The second lines have the redif (refrain word) "olur" (becomes), and the rhyme words are "kūteh" and "şebān-geh"; Özkat counts this kıt'a among those with a single-word redif. The metre is "fe‘ilātün mefā‘ilün fe‘ilün" of the hafif family. There is no pen name (mahlas). The kıt'a is found only in the Fazlî divan section of the miscellany in the Hazine collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum Library (fol. 249b). To whom and when it was written is unknown.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

Özkat says that the fifteenth and sixteenth kıt'as stress how unlucky lovers are when it comes to union. This kıt'a rests on the idea that time flows in two ways for the lover: in separation a day stretches as long as a year, while in union it passes in the blink of an eye. The second couplet ends this thought with a hyperbole: the day of union is so short that its evening comes before its morning has been seen. There is antithesis between morning and evening, long and short. The play of sound between "rūz" (day) and "rūzı" in the second couplet also draws attention: the word can be read as "its day", but it can also be understood as "rūzī", one's lot, in which case the poem says that union can come to the lover only as a stroke of fortune. This second reading is our own interpretation.

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. 381, kıt'a no. 15 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 249b); also p. 65 (on the kıt'as) and p. 69 (redif), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources