Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Mesmūm u melūl eyledim imrār-ı ḥayāt
Zīrā baña çift olmuş idi mār-ı ḥayāt
Derd ortaġı olmaz da olursa bir derd
Ḥavvā da olur Ādeme bir bār-ı ḥayāt
In English
1. I spent the bitterness of life poisoned and sorrowful; for the serpent of life had become my mate.
2. If one is not a sharer of pain but becomes a pain oneself, even Eve becomes a burden of life to Adam.
Literary and Historical Commentary
This last quatrain of the sequence ties the theme of marriage to the story of creation. In the first couplet "mâr-ı hayât", the serpent of life, has become the poet's mate, and so the bitterness of life has been mixed with poison. The image of the serpent also recalls the serpent in the story of the expulsion from Paradise; the fall of Adam and Eve is named openly in the quatrain's last line.
What a spouse should be is said in the second couplet by the negative route: a spouse should be a "derd ortağı", one who shares pain. If, instead of being a sharer of pain, one becomes a pain oneself, even Eve, the mate of the first man, becomes a burden of life to Adam. These last words turn the sequence's harsh satire into a universal wisdom: the worth of marriage lies not in the beauty of the persons but in their sharing each other's burden. Read together with the divan's ghazal that names Eve and Adam as the first example of love, it can be seen that in the poet's hands the same story can be the emblem of both love and burden.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 113 (poem no. 134; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
