Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ)
Āŝār-ı mezār itmelidir bir fāżıl
Kim ẕāʾir ola nūr-ı nigāh-ı kāmil
Āŝārına bir nūr-ı naẓar mess itsün
Ṭopraġını öpmekden ise biñ cāhil
In English
1. A learned man should leave works as his tomb, so that the light of a perfect gaze may visit him.
2. Let a light of insight touch his works; (that) is better than a thousand ignorant men kissing his soil.
Literary and Historical Commentary
What a learned man's real tomb might be is the question the quatrain starts from. The answer is clear: "âsâr", his works. The place to visit a scholar is not his soil but what he wrote, and whoever truly visits him is the one who reads his works with a perfect gaze. That such a gaze should touch his works is worth more than a thousand ignorant men kissing the soil of his grave.
A criticism of tomb and grave visiting turned into show is also here, and in the Persian quatrain that follows it this criticism grows harsher still; there the dervish lodge, the dome and the cenotaph are named as the means by which "tomb-eaters" turn a name into a source of income. That a poet who avoided printing his own divan should say that the work a scholar leaves behind is his true monument also lends a meaning to the reading of this divan today.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 107 (poem no. 113; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
