Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Ḥaḳ virdi baña aḥsen-i ṣavt ahsen-i sīt
Lākin yaşadım şöylece mebhūt u sıkkīt
Bu ḳubbede bāḳī ḳalan ancaḳ ses imiş
Bir sescegiz olsun idebilsem teŝbīt
In English
1. God gave me the finest voice and the finest renown; but I lived on like this, bewildered and silent.
2. What remains under this dome, it seems, is only a voice; if only I could make even one small voice endure.
Literary and Historical Commentary
God, the poet says, gave him "ahsen-i savt" and "ahsen-i sît", the finest voice and the finest renown; yet he spent his life "mebhût u sikkît", bewildered and silent. Few places in the divan are as personal as these four lines. Coming from a poet who, by the account of those close to him, avoided publishing his poems and even hid them jealously, these words can be read as a regret turned towards his own life.
Behind the second couplet stands a thought that lives in Turkish almost as a proverb, "leaving a pleasant echo under this dome": what remains of the world is the echo of a voice, of a word. Cûdî turns this thought into a wish: "Bir sesçeğiz olsun idebilsem tesbît", if only I could make even one tiny voice endure. The diminutive in "sesçeğiz", a little voice, makes heard the poet's wish not for great fame but only to leave a trace. That the divan has come down to us today, even as a single copy, shows that this wish has been fulfilled in some measure.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 105 (poem no. 104; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
