Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün fa (fāʿ)

“Pür-şiʿr-ü heves” mest-i meyi ḫülyādır
Maʿnā-yı “leb-ḥārr” ṣıcaḳ ḥelvādır
“Hengām-ı semen-fām”ay aydınlıġıdır
“Penpe emel” evlenmege bir īmādır
“Bir naġme-i şeffāf” ḳızıñ ince sesi
“Billūr gülüş” ḫazz-ı hevā-peymādır
“Leylāḳlar açarken”dimek on dört onbeş
Çaġında olan duḫter-i nev-sevdādır
“Zanbaḳ öpse yigirmiyle otuz beş arası
Mecnūnlara çokça açılan Leylādır
Maʿşūḳa ile çamlarıñ altında ṣafā
ʿÖrf-i dekadānī de “yeşil ruʾya”dır

In English

1. "Full of poetry and longing" is one drunk on the wine of fancy; the meaning of "warm lip" is warm halva.

2. "The jasmine-coloured hour" is moonlight; "pink hope" is a hint at getting married.

3. "A transparent melody" is a girl's thin voice; "crystal laughter" is a pleasure that roams the air.

4. To say "when the lilacs bloom" means a girl of fourteen or fifteen, newly in love.

5. "If the lily kisses" is a Leylâ between twenty and thirty-five who opens herself freely to Mecnuns.

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

Literary and Historical Commentary

"Sûret-i Sahîha" means the correct form, or the corrected copy, and it is an expanded version of the preceding "Latîfe". Here the poet puts his joke into the order of a dictionary: in each couplet he gives a "decadent" expression in quotation marks and explains its "real" meaning. "Pür-şiir ü heves" is one drunk on the wine of fancy, "leb-i hârr" warm halva, "hengâm-ı semen-fâm" moonlight, "penbe emel" a hint at getting married. The consistent use of quotation marks in the divan is an example, as Tok Yıldız also notes, of the care Cûdî took with punctuation.

The two new entries added in this poem sharpen the joke further. "When the lilacs bloom" is interpreted as a girl of fourteen or fifteen newly in love, and "if the lily kisses" as a Leylâ between twenty and thirty-five who "opens herself freely to Mecnuns". Turning the names of flowers into stages of age is a mocking reading that places an ordinary dalliance of the heart beneath the new poetry's language laden with images of flowers and colours.

Together the two poems are rare documents showing how Cûdî looked at the literary debates of his own time. Cûdî, who elsewhere in the divan criticizes the poets of wine and asks that poetry take nature and truth as its subjects, says here too that behind the ornate language of the new poetry lies a whim rather than a truth. The criticism has chosen the form of a joke instead of a serious essay, and openly declares this choice with its title.

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. 67; manuscript fol. 30b-31a); introduction pp. 8-9. http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf

Online sources