Original Arabic Text

حمداً لک یا من هو نعم المولی
فی قبضتک الکلُّ و انت الاعلی
ربیّ حمدی، انت ولیّی، حسبی
امری لک فی الاخرة والاولی

Reading in Latin letters (the reading is ours):

Ḥamden leke yâ men hüve niʿme'l-mevlâ
Fî ḳabḍatike'l-küllü ve ente'l-aʿlâ
Rabbî ḥamdî ente veliyyî ḥasbî
Emrî leke fi'l-âḫirati ve'l-ûlâ

In English

1. Praise be to You, O You who are the best of masters; all things are in Your grasp, and You are the Most High.

2. My Lord, my praise is Yours; You are my protector, You are enough for me; my affair is Yours in the hereafter and in this world.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The divan's long section titled "Rubâ'iyyât" (quatrains) opens, as the divan itself does, with praise of God; but this time the language is Arabic. The thesis did not transcribe the Arabic quatrains but gave them in Arabic script; we prepared the reading in Latin letters and the translation for this page ourselves. The rubai is a short form completed in four lines, with the first, second and fourth lines rhyming; here the words "mevlâ", "a'lâ" and "ûlâ" make the rhyme.

The wording of the quatrain is close to the language of the Qur'an. "Ni'me'l-mevlâ", the best of masters, is a praise used for God in the Qur'an; "ḥasbî", You are enough for me, recalls the phrase "Hasbünallah", God is enough for us, frequent in Muslim prayers. The pair "âhiret ve ûlâ" (the hereafter and this world) in the last line are also the words of the verse in the sura al-Duhâ, "the hereafter is better for you than this world". So the four lines turn into a sentence of submission built from familiar phrases, as if taken from a book of prayers.

The testimony of İbnülemin Mahmud Kemal, who said that Cûdî knew Arabic like his mother tongue, is borne out by Arabic poems of this kind in the divan. That the quatrain section opens with an Arabic praise is like a small echo of the poem of praise at the beginning of the Turkish divan.

Bibliography

  • Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. None (poem no. 69; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf

Online sources