Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūlün

Hep şiʿr idi gençlikdeki āhenk-i ḥayātım
Gülmezdi faḳaṭ vezn-i sükūnem, ḥarekātım
Sevmekde idi var ise göñlümde ḳarārım
Bir şeyde degil ʿaşḳ yolundaydı ŝebātım
Eşʿār-ı muḥibbimdi güzeller ki oḳurdum
Olmazdı ġazelle dehen-ālūde devātım
Ḥavvā-yı cihān dirdi baña: Ey deliḳanlı
Ebkār-ı meʿānīse ġareż işte benātım
Fi'l-vāḳiʿ o ḳızlardı benim şiʿrime mażmūn
Geh ḫande vü geh girye idi āh-ı lüġātım
Sinnim geçerek ʿaşḳdan oldum müteḳāʿid
Elfāẓ oḳurum şimdi odur elde berātım
ʿAşḳ āteşi söndükde ḥayātım daḫı söndi
Ol dāhiyeden ʿayn-ı helāk oldı necātım
Cūdī görinür miydi ḥayātıñ ṣafaḥātı
Meclā-yı ṣıfāt olmasa āyine-i ẕātım

In English

1. In youth the harmony of my life was all poetry; only my pauses and my movements would not fall into metre (the line is not entirely clear).

2. If my heart had any steadiness, it was in loving; my constancy lay not in any one thing but on the path of love.

3. The beauties I read were the poems I loved; my inkwell's mouth was never smeared with ghazals.

4. The Eve of the world would say to me: "Young man, if your aim is virgin meanings, here are my daughters."

5. In truth those girls were the theme of my poetry; the language of my sighs was now laughter, now tears.

6. As my age passed I retired from love; now I read words, and that is the warrant in my hand.

7. When the fire of love went out, my life went out too; my deliverance from that calamity became utter ruin.

8. Cûdî, would the pages of life be seen if the mirror of my essence were not the place where the attributes appear?

Literary and Historical Commentary

An ageing poet looks back on his youth and in the first couplets describes it as a life lived like a poem; he says that in those years he did not write ghazals and that his inkwell's mouth was not "smeared with ghazals", for the beauties themselves were the poems he read. The scene of conversation in the fourth couplet is among the divan's most endearing inventions: the Eve of the world, the mother of all women, shows the young man her daughters if he is looking for "virgin meanings". "Ebkâr-ı meânî", virgin meanings, is the name in divan poetry for new conceits never said before; by tying this term to real girls the poet blends poetry and life.

From the sixth couplet on, the tone changes. As his age advanced the poet became "mütekaid", retired, from love; all that remains in his hand as the "berât", the warrant of his retirement, is the words he reads. This playful expression, taken from the language of the civil service, carries the trace of a life that came from teaching. The seventh couplet reaches a bitter conclusion: when the fire of love went out, life went out too. The closing couplet ties this personal memory to the idea of unity: the pages of life are seen because the mirror of the essence is the place where the attributes appear. Set against the divan's poems on old age, the ghazal stands as one of the rare personal traces of Cûdî's youth.

Bibliography

  • Zeynep Adıyahşi, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [43b-87b], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, pp. 51-52 (poem no. 207; manuscript fol. 56a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116831.pdf

Online sources