Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Outside the rubai metre (no metre is given in the thesis)
Beşeriyyet ki şu cemʿiyyet merd ü zendir
Aṣlı yek-neşʾe iken birbirine reh-zendir
Kendisi ḫaste yine kendisidir ṭıbb u ṭabīb
Ādemiñ zehri de tiryāḳı da kendindir
In English
1. Humanity, which is this company of men and women, though its origin is a single joy, waylays itself.
2. It is itself the patient, and again itself the medicine and the physician; Adam's poison and his antidote too lie in himself.
Literary and Historical Commentary
A short diagnosis of humanity is given in this quatrain, whose title says it is written outside the rubai metre. Humanity, with its men and women, was born of one source, of a single joy; yet despite this shared root it waylays itself. The word "reh-zen", highwayman, describes the evils people do to one another through the image of a brigand.
From diagnosis the second couplet passes to cure: humanity is both the patient and its physician; its poison and its antidote are within it. This thought carries the belief that man can heal his own evil with his own reason and morals, and it looks in the same direction as the divan's quatrains on education and knowledge. The juxtaposition of the words "tıbb u tabîb", medicine and physician, and the contrast between poison and theriac give the quatrain the language of medicine.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 115 (poem no. 140; manuscript fol. 39a). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
