Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefʿūlü fāʿilātü mefāʿīlü fāʿilün

Bir seng-i maḳber olsa naẓarlarda āşikār
Bir ḥacleniñ tahaccür iden gizli keyfidir
Maġdūr ider ḫalef selefiñ hep müselselen
Bāʿiŝ olan ḥayāt u memātıñ da seyfidir
Maḳtūl egerçi ḳātiliniñ ḳahr-ı ẓulmüdür
Evvel-be-evvel ümm ü ebiñ heder-i ḥayfıdır
Her nevʿ mevt ile ölen ādem şehīd olur
Mevtiñ zavallı ḳayd-ı ḥayāt ile ḫayfıdır
Ey zindeler bu fātiḥa sizden nedir bize
Ḳaçmış ḥayātıñ üstümüze recʿ-i ṭayfıdır
18 45b: Bu sayfa, yazma nüshada boş bırakılmıştır.

In English

1. A gravestone that stands plain before the eyes is the hidden pleasure of a bridal chamber turned to stone.

2. The one who comes after is ever wronged by the one before, in a chain; what causes life and death is also (death's) sword.

3. The slain man, it is true, is the wrath of his killer's oppression; (but) first of all he is the wasted pity of his mother and father.

4. A man who dies by any kind of death becomes a martyr; the poor fear of death is (bound up) with the bond of life.

5. O living, what is this Fâtiha from you to us? It is the return upon us of the phantom of a life that has fled.

Literary and Historical Commentary

These five couplets, titled "an epitaph for his own gravestone", carry the divan's most pessimistic words. In classical literature kıtas written by poets for their own gravestones are a known kind; Cûdî's epitaph, however, is not a prayer or a word of humility but a bitter judgement on existence. In the first couplet the gravestone is seen as the "hidden pleasure of a bridal chamber turned to stone": at the beginning of every grave there is a birth, and at the beginning of every birth a pleasure.

This thought recalls the well-known line that the Arab poet Abu'l-'Alâ' al-Ma'arrî wished to be written on his own grave: "This is the wrong my father did to me, and I did it to no one." That a few pages later in the divan a couplet is taken from Abu'l-'Alâ' and answered with a nazire shows that Cûdî knew this poet well. In the third couplet even a man who is killed is counted first not as his killer's wrong but as the "wasted pity" of the mother and father who brought him into the world. The fourth couplet lightens the pain by turning every death into martyrdom; the last couplet turns to the visitors of the grave and describes the Fâtiha they recite as the return of the phantom of a life that has fled. The rhymes "keyf, seyf, hayf, tayf" build a short, hard series of sounds.

Bibliography

  • Zeynep Adıyahşi, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [43b-87b], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 27 (poem no. 185; manuscript fol. 45a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116831.pdf

Online sources