Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefāʿilün feʿilātün mefāʿilün feʿilün
Geçen sene neler itmişdiñ ey ḫabīŝ bize
Ki sıġmıyorduñ atup ṭutmada ḳaradeñize
Bize burun şişirirdiñ amān didikçe saña
Aman di haydi bugün sen de yalvar ingilize
In English
1. You vile one, what things you did to us last year, when you could not fit into the Black Sea for all your bluster!
2. You used to turn up your nose at us whenever we cried "mercy" to you; come, cry "mercy", today you too beg the English!
Literary and Historical Commentary
The "fishermen's incident" of the title is the firing, on the night of 21-22 October 1904, by the Russian Baltic fleet on its way to the Far East, on British fishing boats off the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, which it took for enemy torpedo boats. Fishermen were killed in the incident, Britain and Russia came to the brink of war, and the matter was taken to an international commission of inquiry and closed with Russia paying compensation. In these two couplets Cûdî sees the incident as a kind of revenge for the tensions the Ottoman state had lived through with Russia.
The expression "last year" in the first couplet points to the pressures Russia put on the Ottoman state over the Black Sea and the Straits; exactly which event is meant is not said in the poem. The idiom "not fitting into the Black Sea" expresses both arrogance and the Russian navy's wish to come out of the Black Sea. The second couplet uses the word "aman", mercy, in two directions: Russia, who turned up its nose whenever the Ottomans said "aman", must now say "aman" to Britain. Like the poem on the Russo-Japanese War, this kıta shows that the poet followed world events closely in 1904-1905 and interpreted them through Ottoman concerns.
Bibliography
- Zeynep Adıyahşi, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [43b-87b], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 98 (poem no. 246; manuscript fol. 73b). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116831.pdf
Online sources
