Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Köylerde yaşa, girme adam bolluġına
Ādem şaşırır düşse madam bolluġına
Gönderme ki efernce çocuḳ ferce bulur
Taḥṣīl ü teẕekkür diye am bolluġına
In English
1. Live in the villages, do not enter the crowd of people; a man is bewildered if he falls into a plenty of "madams".
2. Do not send the child to the land of the Franks for study and learning; there the child falls into lust and (in the end) is lost in a plenty of women. (The couplet carries a bawdy play on words.)
Literary and Historical Commentary
Added to the preceding comic quatrain under the title "Diğer", another, this quatrain turns the joke's direction from marriage to the young sent to the West. The first couplet sets the crowd of the city and its plenty of "madams" against the plainness of village life. "Madam" was a word used in nineteenth-century Ottoman cities for women who were European or dressed in the European manner, and it points to the same circle as the criticism of civilization in the divan's incomplete ghazal titled "Latîfe".
The second couplet voices, through bawdy plays on words, the fear that children sent to Europe for study will be corrupted there morally; the use of the words "ferc" and "am" carries the quatrain to the edge of a conversational joke. After the Tanzimat, sending students to Europe was a debated subject in Ottoman society, and this quatrain is a coarse joke from the traditionalist side of that debate. Ali Canip Yöntem's witness that Cûdî's wit and grace sometimes went "as far as ribaldry and humour, even satire" helps to understand poems of this kind.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 117 (poem no. 146; manuscript fol. 39b-40b); introduction p. 6. http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
