Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefāʿīlün mefāʿīlün feʿūlün
Baña dirler ki: Cūdī şiʿr söyle
Evet ben de ḫayāl isterdim öyle
Faḳaṭ ḫangi ḫayāle mess idersem
Ḥaḳīḳat şekline girmekde böyle
In English
1. They tell me, "Cûdî, recite a poem"; yes, I too would have liked to have imagination like that.
2. But whatever fancy I touch, it takes on, like this, the shape of truth.
Literary and Historical Commentary
An answer to those who say "Cûdî, recite a poem", this quatrain is his shortest and most graceful statement of his own idea of poetry. Those around him ask him for poetry; poetry here is identified with imagination, with the ornate and exaggerated images of divan poetry. The poet admits that he too would like "imagination like that", that is, would wish to write such poetry.
The last two lines carry, with a fine joke, a confession: whatever fancy he touches, that fancy takes on the shape of truth. In Cûdî's hands poetry ceases to be a game of fancy and turns into a thought, a piece of wisdom. The divan's philosophical ghazals, its moral quatrains and the poems he wrote against the naturalists and the poets of wine bear out these words. The words "söyle, öyle, böyle" repeated at the ends of the lines give the quatrain the ease of spoken language, and this ease allows the poet to describe himself in a plain but deep word.
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. 177; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
