Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlün faʿ (fāʿ) and Mefʿūlü mefāʿīlü mefāʿīlü feʿūl
Ṣāfī -küçük oġlum- oḳur evde ḳurʾān
Riḳḳatli ṣabī ṣavt-ı raḳīḳinde ʿayān
Āvāz-ı ḥazīnendeki luṭf-ı elḥān
Aʿṣāba ṭoḳundıḳca olur rūḥ-ı revān
In English
1. Sâfî (my little son) recites the Qur'an at home; in his thin voice a tender-hearted child shows itself.
2. The grace of the melodies in his mournful voice becomes life to the soul as it touches the nerves.
Literary and Historical Commentary
Within the first line the poet places an explanation between two short dashes, and so opens one of the divan's most personal and warmest scenes: "Sâfî -küçük oğlum- okur evde Kur'ân", Sâfî, my little son, recites the Qur'an at home. Havva Tok Yıldız's thesis states, on the basis of his own words, that Cûdî had three sons, that his first son Mehmed Nurülhüdâ died young, and that his other two sons, Ahmed Azmi and Hüseyin Sâfî, survived. The Sâfî of the quatrain is the younger of these sons.
The scene is a father listening to his son reciting the Qur'an at home. In the child's thin, "rakîk" voice there is tenderness and sorrow; as the melodies of this voice touch the nerves, they give life to the father's soul. The word "a'sâb", nerves, is taken from the medical language of the late nineteenth century and expresses the bodily counterpart of feeling. When one thinks of the elegy near the end of the divan written for his son Nurülhüdâ, this small quatrain's recording of the joy and tenderness felt for a living son carries a further meaning.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 123 (poem no. 164; manuscript fol. ); introduction p. 3. http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
