Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefāʿīlün mefāʿīlün mefāʿīlün mefāʿīlün

Benim çekdiklerim gögsümdeki eski körükdendir
Şitā-ı hengāmı yaʿnī ıżṭırābım o körükdendir
Beyāż süt var iken içmem siyeh ḳaṭranıñ ey ṣāḳī
ʿİlācım ḳalʿa-i bālādaki sütci yörükdendir

In English

1. What I suffer comes from the old bellows in my chest; in the season of winter, that is, my distress comes from that bellows.

2. Cupbearer, while there is white milk I will not drink your black tar; my cure comes from the nomad milkman of the upper fortress.

Literary and Historical Commentary

This quatrain titled "Öksürük içün irticâlen", improvised for a cough, is one of the divan's most everyday and most playful poems. The poet likens his chest to an old bellows; the lungs breathe like a smith's bellows, and in winter this bellows breaks down. An old man's winter cough thus takes on the image of a craftsman's tool.

The well-known tavern scene of divan poetry becomes a joke in the second couplet. The cupbearer is addressed, but this time it is a matter not of wine but of medicine: the poet will not drink the cupbearer's "black tar", perhaps a tarry syrup given for coughs, or wine, and prefers white milk. His cure comes from the nomad milkman of "kal'a-i bâlâ", the upper fortress. Which city this place belongs to is not said in the poem; but because the name of a neighbourhood milkman enters the poem, the quatrain reads like a scene taken from the poet's daily life. This kıta, said to have been improvised, is among the texts that let us hear most closely the voice of the Cûdî described by Ali Canip Yöntem as a master of conversation and wit.

Bibliography

  • Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 126 (poem no. 175; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
  • Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 6 (quotation from Ali Canip Yöntem, "Unutulmuş Şöhretlerden: Muallim Cûdî Efendi"). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf

Online sources