Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Vezin: Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün

Devlet atına süvâr olmış iki sîmîn-beden
Gûyiyâ ḫalḳ-ı cihâna biri cândur biri ten
Biri İskender-i devrân birisi Ḥaydar Şâh
Tîġ-ı ḳahrına bularuñ döye mi burc u beden
Bularuñ biri melekdür biri firişte ‘ayân
Ki temâşâ ider anları ol arada giden
Mihrî mihrin bularuñ göremez illâ ki raḳîb
Neyleyelüm kişiye her işi ṭâli‘dür iden
‘Īd-i aḍḥâ ne mübârek gün idi gördüm ḫoş
Devlet atına süvâr olmış iki sîmîn-beden

In English

1. Two silver-bodied beauties have mounted the steed of fortune and come riding; it is as if, for the people of the world, one were the soul and the other the body. (To mount the steed of fortune means to be at the height of luck and standing; their riding speaks both of a real ride and of their high rank.)

2. One is the Alexander of the age, the other Haydar Shah. Could tower or wall withstand the sword of their wrath? (Burç is a fortress tower and beden a fortress wall; the word beden also recalls the human body. The couplet can therefore be read in two ways: neither fortress wall nor human body can withstand their swords.)

3. One of them is an angel, and the other is plainly an angel too; everyone who passes that way stops and watches them. (Melek is of Arabic and firişte of Persian origin; both mean the same thing. With this repetition the poet says that she sees the two beauties as equally angelic.)

4. Mihrî cannot see their affection, their smiling face; only the rival sees it. What can we do, it is one's fortune that does everything that happens to a person. (Mihr means both affection and the sun, and comes from the same root as the poet's pen name. The couplet can be read in two ways: Mihrî cannot attain their love and only the rival has a share of it; or, because the rival comes between, Mihrî cannot even see their faces.)

5. What a blessed day the Feast of Sacrifice was; on that day I saw with a glad heart two silver-bodied beauties mounted on the steed of fortune.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The hundred and twenty-third ghazal (gazel) of the divan has five couplets (beyit) and is composed in the remel metre of aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün". The ghazal is a verse form whose first couplet rhymes in both lines, which treats love and beauty, and which carries the poet's pen name (mahlas) in the last couplet or a couplet near the end. In this poem there is no redif (refrain word); the rhyme rests on the sound "-en" in the words "beden, ten, beden, giden, iden". The pen name occurs not, as is customary, in the last couplet but in the fourth. The reason lies in the structure of the last couplet: the second line of the fifth couplet is an exact repetition of the first line of the ghazal. In divan poetry this repetition is called "redd-i matla‘"; the poem thus closes by returning to the image with which it opened, and the picture of the two mounted beauties stays in the reader's mind like a frame. The ghazal is found only in the Ankara (M) and Istanbul University (Ü) manuscripts; the differences between manuscripts are small variant readings such as "sîm" in place of "sîmîn".

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The poem differs from many ghazals in the divan in describing the beloved not as one person but as two young people riding side by side. The poet first sees them as a pair completing each other like soul and body; in the second couplet she exalts them with the names of rulers. The phrase "İskender-i devrân", the Alexander of the age, meaning the world conqueror of his time, is a formula of praise often used in divan poetry. Mahmut Başaran, in his article on the influence of the Şehnâme on Mihrî, reads this couplet as naming Alexander and Shah Haydar as two rulers remembered for their wars, and explains that "neither body nor heart can withstand their swords". The words "burc u beden" are also terms of fortress architecture; by using the words sword, tower and wall together the poet builds a congruence of images (tenasüp) and says that no defence can hold before the beauty of the two young people.

In the third couplet "melek" and "firişte" are synonyms; the poet chose this repetition deliberately, as a way of saying that she makes no distinction in rank between the two beauties. In the fourth couplet the phrase "Mihrî mihrin" is a play on sound between the pen name and "mihr", meaning "love, sun"; this pun is frequent in Mihrî's divan. The rival's intervention and the taking refuge in fortune are familiar motifs of the love ghazal. In the last couplet the poem is tied to a concrete picture of a feast morning: two young people seen on horseback on the Feast of Sacrifice. This concrete mark of time and event makes the ghazal look less like a conventional love poem than like an observation, perhaps a holiday outing or procession turned into poetry; but the text does not give the details of the event.

Historical Context

The identity of the riders is not known with certainty. The thesis Gülşen Kaya prepared on Mihrî's divan mentions this ghazal in its discussion of İskender Çelebi, son of Sinan Pasha, and states that of the two young men Mihrî saw on horseback on the day of the Feast of Sacrifice, one was Haydar Shah and the other İskender. The tezkires (biographical anthologies of poets; Latîfî, Âşık Çelebi, Kınalızâde) relate that there was a bond of the heart between Mihrî and İskender Çelebi and point to the poems in the divan in which "İskender" occurs as evidence; the name of this ghazal does not appear in the tezkires. Kaya writes that nothing is known about Haydar Shah, and that it is also not known whether he is the same person as the acrobat (cânbâz) Haydar mentioned in one of the divan's murabbas. Başaran, for his part, reads the names in the couplet not as historical persons but as the names of two famous rulers of the literary tradition. Whether the word "İskender" here is an allusion to İskender Çelebi in Mihrî's circle or only a formula of praise has therefore not been settled in the sources; the connection based on report can be mentioned only as a possibility.

Bibliography

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