Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Bir ṭutsa idi nevʿini nefsiyle beşer
Olsaydı eger fāʿil-i ḫayr-ı āb-ı şer
Rāḥat idecek görmiyecekdiñ aṣla
Bunda ḥaşerāt anda ʿaẕāb-ı maḥşer
In English
1. Had man held his kind as he holds himself, had he himself been the doer of good and evil… (The couplet is not entirely clear.)
2. You would never have seen a place where you could rest: here vermin, there the torment of the Resurrection.
Literary and Historical Commentary
As the thesis reads it, the first couplet yields no clear sense. It seems that the poet imagines a situation in which man treats his own kind as he treats himself and is the doer of both good and evil. The lines are like parts of a conditional sentence, and the answer comes in the second couplet.
In the second couplet, by contrast, the sense is plain: there would never be a place to rest; here there are vermin, there the torment of the Resurrection. "Haşerât", harmful insects, is the name of the small but endless troubles of this world, "azâb-ı mahşer" that of the great punishment of the hereafter. The poem describes man's failure to find peace in both worlds through a bridge between these two words. Since the sense of the first couplet is not settled, the interpretation of the quatrain as a whole also remains a suggestion.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 119 (poem no. 152; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
