Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Outside the rubai metre (no metre is given in the thesis)
Şuʿarā mecmūʿaya olsa meşʿar
Olsa evvel meşʿar o cümle maʿşer
Ben o maʿşerde bulunmam ṣaġ iken
İstemem yüzlerini hem maḥşer
In English
1. Were the poets gathered together in an anthology, and that company first become a place of assembly (meş'ar),
2. While I am alive I will not be in that company; nor do I want to see their faces at the Resurrection either.
Literary and Historical Commentary
One of Cûdî's most open statements about his own life as a poet comes in this small quatrain. It objects to the idea of poets being gathered in a "mecmû'a", an anthology, and says that as long as he is alive he will not be in that company. The last line completes this with a joke: he does not want to see those poets' faces at the Resurrection either. The words "meş'ar", "ma'şer" and "mahşer" build a series of places of gathering playing on the same sounds: a place of worship, a company, and the assembly of the Last Day.
What the sources tell about Cûdî agrees directly with this. Vehbi Cem Aşkun and Ali Canip Yöntem relate that he kept his poems from print and that the few poems of his that appeared in newspapers and journals were taken from him "after a thousand and one entreaties". In the previous quatrain the envy of the company of poets was criticized; here the same stance turns into the poet's own decision. That the divan survives today only as a single copy is one of the consequences of this decision.
Bibliography
- Havva Tok Yıldız, Merzifonlu İbrâhîm Cûdî Dîvânı (İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük) [1b-43a], Master's thesis, Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun 2017, p. 124 (poem no. 170; manuscript fol. ). http://libra.omu.edu.tr/tezler/116853.pdf
Online sources
