Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Her şey görinür nefsine ġāyetle yaḳīn
Bunda göz açan olmamaḳ olmaz ḫōd-bīn
Engüştüñi gözden yuḳarı ḳaldır baḳ
Alçaḳ görinür dūrdaki ki kūh-ı berīn
In English
1. Everything appears exceedingly near to itself; in this, even one with open eyes cannot escape being self-centred. (The second line is not entirely clear.)
2. Raise your finger before your eye and look: the lofty mountain far away appears lower (than your finger).
Literary and Historical Commentary
Self-centredness is explained here by an illusion of sight. Everyone sees what is near him as large and what is far as small; the more man measures the world from his own point of view, the more he places himself at the centre. The second couplet shows this through an observation anyone can try: if you raise your finger before your eye, the great mountain far away appears lower than your finger.
Turning a simple fact of perspective into a moral lesson is the quatrain's conceit. The finger close to the eye is like man's own self; the lofty mountain far away is the worth of others, perhaps truth itself. In the divan images taken from science and observation are often carried into moral and Sufi thought; this quatrain is among the plainest and most memorable examples of them. The thesis reading leaves the second line of the first couplet partly unresolved, so the English prose is only approximate there.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 110 (poem no. 122; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
