Original Ottoman Turkish Text

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

Rām eyledüm adına diyüp şi‘r o perīnüñ
Çoḳ kimse dimişler benüm içün bilür esmā’
Baḥr olsa yaşum ḳaṭreleri ger ‘aceb olmaz
İy Fażlī mes̱eldür bu göl olur dame dama

In English

1. I tamed that fairy (peri) by composing poems in her name; and many people have said of me, "he knows the names, the secret spells".

2. It is no wonder if the drops of my tears become a sea; O Fazlî, this is a proverb: drop by drop a lake is made.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a kıt'a (fragment) of two couplets (beyit); the words "esmā'" and "dama" at the end of the second lines rhyme, and Özkat counts this kıt'a as having full rhyme. The metre is "mef‘ūlü mefā‘īlü mefā‘īlü fe‘ūlün" of the hezec family. The pen name (mahlas) appears in the second couplet. 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. 231a). In a footnote Özkat records that the beginning of the poem is missing in the manuscript; these two couplets are the end of a longer poem whose opening has been lost. To whom and when it was written is unknown.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

Özkat states that this kıt'a is addressed to the beloved. In the first couplet the beloved is likened to a fairy (peri), and the poet says he has bound her to himself with the poems he composed in her name. People saying of him that "he knows the names" seems to rest on the idea that a fairy is brought under control by reciting names; the link between the phrase "poems in her name" and the word "esmā'" (names) is our own interpretation. The couplet has an air of playful boasting: what has bound the beloved to the poet is his poetry.

The second couplet grounds the hyperbole of tears in a proverb. The phrase "göl olur dame dama" is the proverb "damlaya damlaya göl olur" (drop by drop a lake is made). Özkat says that Fazlî, as a pupil of Zâtî, continued the tradition of using proverbs and idioms in poetry, and he cites this couplet in two separate places as an example of the proverbs Fazlî uses. Here the poet names the proverb openly by saying "mes̱eldür" (it is a proverb); this is the figure called irsal-i mesel (the citing of a proverb). There is also a congruence of images (tenasüp) among the words drop, sea and lake.

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. 378, kıt'a no. 6 (Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Hazine, fol. 231a); also p. 43 and p. 88 (proverbs), p. 65 (on the kıt'as) and p. 69 (rhyme), https://katalog.marmara.edu.tr/veriler/yordambt/cokluortam/5E/T0051713.pdf.

Online sources