Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Āġūş-ı zamāne düşen aġlar ne ʿaceb
Aġlar düşen āġūş-ı zamāndan aġreb
Hep girye midir dehre selām ile vedāʿ
Bunda gelen aġlar giden aġlar yā Rabb
In English
1. Whoever falls into the lap of time weeps, how strange! And whoever falls from the lap of time weeps more strangely still.
2. Is greeting the world and bidding it farewell all weeping? Here the one who comes weeps, and the one who goes weeps, O Lord!
Literary and Historical Commentary
Birth and death meet in this quatrain in a single image of weeping. The newborn child comes into the world weeping; the one who dies goes, leaving others weeping after him. In the first couplet the poet compares these two moments as "falling into the lap of time" and "falling from the lap of time"; both happen with weeping, and the second is stranger still. The words "ne aceb" and "ağreb", how strange and stranger, give the quatrain a tone of wonder.
With the second couplet the thought turns into a question and a cry: is greeting the world and bidding it farewell all weeping? The last line gives the answer as a plain observation: here the one who comes weeps, and the one who goes weeps too. The transience of the world is often worked in the Turkish and Persian poems of the divan; this quatrain tells that thought through the shortest and most everyday picture, a scene of birth and a funeral.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 101 (poem no. 89; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
