Original Persian Text
این بنده بدنیا ید و پا بست آمد
بی هوش و زبان، بی هنر ومست آمد
هش داد خدا پای و زبانش بکشود
لیکن بدر مرک تهی دست آمد
Reading in Latin letters (the reading is ours):
În bende be-dünyâ yed u pâ-best âmed
Bî-hûş u zebân bî-hüner u mest âmed
Hoş dâd Ḫudâ pây u zebâneş be-güşûd
Lîkin be-der-i merg tehî-dest âmed
In English
1. This servant came into the world with hands and feet bound; without wit or tongue, without skill, and drunk he came.
2. God gave him wit and loosed his feet and his tongue; yet to the door of death he came empty-handed.
Literary and Historical Commentary
The Persian quatrains of the rubai section begin with this one, and all of them are short sayings of wisdom. This first one describes human life between two doors: birth and death. The servant comes into the world with hands and feet bound, without wit or tongue, without skill, unaware of himself like a drunkard; the state of a newborn baby is drawn with these four attributes. God then gives him wit and looses his feet and tongue; he walks, speaks, thinks.
The last line wipes out all this gain with one stroke: man arrives at the door of death empty-handed once more. Between helplessness at birth and helplessness at death, the wit, feet and tongue he was given have gained nothing unless they have been turned into a capital to carry into the hereafter. "Tehî-dest", empty-handed, is a well-known word in Persian poetry for the idea that nothing can be taken from the world; here it gives the quatrain a tone of moral warning.
In the thesis the Persian text is set in Arabic script, with the Persian letter "gef" printed as "kef". Neither a Latin transcription nor a translation is found there, so both were made here.
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. 93; manuscript fol. 35b). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
