Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fe‘ilātün / fe‘ilātün / fe‘ilātün / fe‘ilün

Ḫalḳıñ ifsād ider ol beççe-i tersā dīnini
Be müselmān ḳayırmaz o hīç aṣlā dīnini
Düşicek pāyına mestāne çeküp ḫancerini
Didi girü ṭur eyā ‘āşıḳ-ı şeydā dīnini
Vāżıḥā bāde-i la‘l-i lebi ol muġ-beçeniñ
İḫtiyār itdirir āḫir baña ‘Īsā dīnini

In English

1. That Christian child corrupts the people's faith; come now, Muslim, he cares nothing at all for religion.

2. When I fell drunk at his feet, he drew his dagger and said, "Stand back, O frenzied lover, (mind) your faith".

3. O Vâzıh, the ruby wine of that Magian boy's lip will in the end make me choose the religion of Jesus.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is the sixteenth piece in the Mukatta‘ât section of the Dîvânçe. Babaarslan counts it as an incomplete (nâ-tamâm) ghazal, while Özçakmak, who takes most of the poems of the section as nazm, lists this piece among the kıt‘as. The rhyming of both lines of the opening couplet supports Babaarslan's view. It has three couplets and is written in the remel pattern "fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilün". The redif (refrain word) is "dīnini" (his/your faith), and the rhyme is the "-ā" of "tersā, aṣlā, şeydā, ‘Īsā". The pen name (mahlas) appears in the last couplet.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The poem rests on the types, frequent in divan poetry, of the "tersā-beçe" (Christian boy) and the "muġ-beçe" (Magian boy, the youth who serves wine in the tavern). The beloved is a beauty who corrupts the people's faith; the exclamation "be müselmān" is a reproachful form of address still heard in Turkish as "be Müslüman" (come now, Muslim). In the second couplet the lover falls drunk at the beauty's feet, and the beauty draws his dagger and turns him back. How the redif "dīnini" is attached to the sentence in the second line of this couplet is not entirely clear; in the translation we have given the sense "mind your faith" in parentheses.

The last couplet ends with a hyperbole: the wine offered from the beauty's lip will in the end bring the poet over to the religion of Jesus. The lip is compared to the la‘l stone and to wine because of its colour. It may seem surprising to find such words in the poetry of a scholar who served as mufti of Amasya; but this is a familiar motif of divan poetry and is not read as a statement of the poet's faith. Babaarslan notes that Vâzıh wrote in a light, coquettish manner in the line of Nedîm. In the fifty-fourth ghazal of the Dîvânçe too the "infidel" beloved is denounced to Jesus; the two poems are written around the same motif.

Bibliography

Academic studies

  • Giyasi Babaarslan, "Amasyalı Vâzıh ve Dîvânçesi", Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi, 5(4), 2021, pp. 1922-1984 (text of the poem: p. 1966; Mustafa Vâzıh, Dîvânçe, Ankara University, Department of Manuscripts, Mustafa Con A 495/III, fol. 69b). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/akaded/article/993264
  • Giyasi Babaarslan, "Amasyalı Vâzıh ve Dîvânçesi", Akademik Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi, 5(4), 2021, pp. 1924-1930 (life and description of the Dîvânçe). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/pub/akaded/article/993264
  • Fatma Özçakmak, "Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi ve Dîvânçe'si", Kesit Akademi Dergisi, 7(26), 2021, pp. 255-278, p. 274.

Online sources