Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Bir zen ki degil ġonce-dehen, nerm-süḫan
Ne yüzde ne sözde görinür nūr-ı ḥasen
Ḥıżr olsa bile tīz ḳaçar anıñ ḳocası
Cennet daḫi olsa evidir beyt-i ḥazen
In English
1. A woman who is neither rosebud-mouthed nor soft of speech; no light of beauty shows either in her face or in her words.
2. Were her husband Khidr himself he would flee her at once; were her home Paradise itself, it would be a house of sorrow.
Literary and Historical Commentary
A coarse, loveless wife is the subject of one of the harshest quatrains in the marriage sequence. The first couplet denies the woman's beauty and speech together: she is neither rosebud-mouthed nor soft of speech; there is no light of beauty either in her face or in her words. The second couplet states the result of this state through two exaggerated comparisons: were her husband Khidr, who attained immortality and comes to aid everywhere, he would flee her; were her home Paradise, it would turn into a "beyt-i hazen", the house of sorrow in which Jacob wept for his son.
In divan poetry woman usually appears in the idealized form of the beloved; marriage and the wife are seldom made a subject. Cûdî's quatrains in this sequence enter an unusual field in this respect. Whether the quatrains bear on the poet's own life is not known; the texts, within a tradition of satire and wisdom, describe the burden of marriage in a language mixed with jest. It should also be said that the quatrain's portrait of a woman may strike today's reader as harsh.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 112 (poem no. 131; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
