Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün fa (fāʿ)

Pür-şiʿr ü heves ʿāşıḳ-ı ḫoş-ḫülyādır
Billūr gülüş ḫuẕ-ı hevā-peymādır
Hengām-ı semen-fām meserret demidir
Hem penpe emel tāze ḳıza īmādır
Maʿşūḳa ile çamlarıñ altında ṣafā
ʿÖrf-i deḳadānī de “yeşil ruʾyā”dır
Bir naġme-i şeffāf ḳızıñ ince sesi
Maʿnā-yı leb-ḥārr ṣıcaḳ ḥelvādır

In English

1. (This) is a lover full of poetry and longing, with pleasant fancies; "crystal laughter" is a pleasure that roams the air.

2. "The jasmine-coloured hour" is a moment of joy; "pink hope" is a hint at a young girl.

3. Delighting with the beloved under the pines is, in decadent usage, "a green dream".

4. "A transparent melody" is a girl's thin voice; the meaning of "warm lip" is warm halva.

Literary and Historical Commentary

A Dictionary for the Decadents

These four couplets should be read together with "Sûret-i Sahîha", which follows immediately. Both are written in the rubai metre and explain the same expressions in quotation marks: "billur gülüş" (crystal laughter), "hengâm-ı semen-fâm" (the jasmine-coloured hour), "penbe emel" (pink hope), "nağme-i şeffâf" (a transparent melody), "leb-i hârr" (warm lip) and "yeşil rüya" (a green dream). These expressions recall the new phrasings seen in the poetry of the Servet-i Fünûn circle at the end of the 1890s, which its opponents mocked as "decadent". In the third couplet Cûdî names this openly: "örf-i dekadânî", decadent usage.

The humour of the poem lies in bringing these ornate, abstract phrases down to everyday, even vulgar meanings. Pink hope is a hint at a young girl, sitting with the beloved under the pines is dressed up as "a green dream", a transparent melody is a girl's thin voice, and the warm lip turns in the end into a warm halva. In this way the blurred images of the new poetry are set against the plain desires behind them.

This stance may look like a contradiction in Cûdî's divan; for the poet is one who translated from Lamartine, gave his poems new titles and brought new words such as telegraph, stamp and railway into verse. But the title "Latîfe" shows that the target is not innovation as such; this is a joke aimed at one particular style. The next poem of the divan carries the joke on by turning it into a dictionary.

Bibliography

  • Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 91 (poem no. 66; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf

Online sources