Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ)
Allāh tecellīsini tekrār itmez
Bir şeyʾi iki ṣafḥada iẓhār itmez
Āŝār-ı nev-ā-nevdir olan manẓūruñ
Bilmez bunı kim riḳḳat-i āŝār itmez
In English
1. God does not repeat His manifestation; He does not show a thing on two pages.
2. The works you behold are ever new; whoever does not feel the delicacy of the works does not know this.
Literary and Historical Commentary
"There is no repetition in manifestation" is a well-known principle of Sufism, and Cûdî turns it into four lines of verse. God's showing of Himself in the world is new at every moment; no sight is the same as the one before. The poet expresses this through the image of a book: God does not show a thing on two pages; each page is separate and new.
To see this newness, the second couplet says, is a matter of sensibility. The works are "nev-â-nev", ever new; but only one who attends to their delicacy, their "rikkat", knows it. The same tree, the same sky, the same face seem to repeat every day; the attentive eye finds something new in them at every moment. One may think that this belief stands behind the divan's nature poems, its tableaux of spring and its quatrains of the morning breeze: a world that is new at every moment is worth beholding anew at every moment.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 109 (poem no. 119; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
