Original Persian Text
هر نخل که در باغ جهان می بینم
آمد شد منشار برآن می بینم
منشار دو دندانهء عمرت شب و روز
ای خواجه بر خواب کران می بینم
Reading in Latin letters made for this page:
Her naḫl ki der bâġ-ı cihân mî-bînem
Âmed-şod-ı minşâr ber ân mî-bînem
Minşâr-ı dü-dendâne-i ʿumret şeb u rûz
Ey ḫˇâce ber ḫˇâb-ı girân mî-bînem
In English
1. On every tree I see in the garden of the world I see the coming and going of a saw.
2. The two-toothed saw of your life is night and day; O master, (and you) I see in heavy sleep.
Literary and Historical Commentary
How time wears life away is told in this Persian quatrain through a single powerful image. The world is a garden, people are its trees, and over every tree a saw is going back and forth. The two teeth of the saw are night and day; with each stroke a piece of the tree is lost. Night and day gnawing at human life is a very old comparison in the literatures of the East; in traditions reaching from Kalîla and Dimna to Rûmî it is told through black and white mice gnawing a rope. Cûdî turns the same idea into a carpenter's tool and builds a harsher picture.
The last line shows the quatrain's real addressee: "ey hˇâce", O master. While the saw works on unceasingly, the master is in heavy sleep. Sleep here is the name of heedlessness; the man who does not notice time passing sleeps without hearing the sound of the saw. The quatrain's rhyme is built with the verb "mî-bînem", I see, and this repetition strengthens the feeling that the poet is listing what he sees like a witness.
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. 94; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
