Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilün

N'ola dilber luṭf idüp yâd itse ben bî-çâresin
Görse tîr-i ġamzesinden dilde yüz yüz yâresin
Çeşm-i ḫûn-rîzüñ elinden kime feryâd ideyin
Kim içer ḳanumı her dem gözlemez âvâresin
Dûd-ı âhından es̱er tâ bilesin ‘âşıḳlaruñ
Göresin gül ṣafḥañuñ üstinde ḫaṭṭuñ ḳarasın
Yâ ṭapuñdan dûr idem cânâ raḳîb-i kelbi ben
Yâ yedürem bir gün aña loḳma loḳma pâresin
Yolına cân virmek imiş Mihrî ancaḳ çâresi
Yâr içün aġyâra varup nice bir yalvarasın

In English

1. What if the beloved were to be kind and remember me, helpless as I am; if she were to see, hundreds upon hundreds of wounds in my heart from the arrow of her glance.

2. To whom shall I cry out against the hand of your blood-shedding eye? It drinks my blood at every moment and never looks after its own wanderer, that is, me. (There is a nearness built on the word "göz" (eye) in the word "gözlemez" (does not look after).)

3. So that you may know it is a trace of the lovers' smoking sighs, may you see the blackness of the down (haṭ) on the page of your rose-like cheek. (The poet interprets the dark down on the beloved's cheek as the soot left by the smoke rising from the lovers' burning sighs.)

4. O soul, either I shall drive that dog-natured rival away from your threshold, or one day I shall feed him his own pieces, morsel by morsel. (The second line says literally "I shall make him eat his pieces morsel by morsel"; the couplet is understood as a threat to tear the rival to shreds. With the reading "raḳîbi kelbi" in the Ü manuscript the sense is "the rival, that dog".)

5. O Mihrî, the only remedy, it seems, is to give your life on her road; how long will you go to the rivals and plead for the sake of the beloved?

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The hundred and thirty-third ghazal has five couplets and is written in the remel metre in the pattern "Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilâtün Fâ‘ilün". The rhyme is built on the sound "-âre" and the redif (refrain word) on the suffix "-sin" added to these sounds (bî-çâresin, yâresin, âvâresin, pâresin). "Ḳarasın" in the third couplet and "yalvarasın" in the closing couplet answer the rhyme with a short "a"; in the last, the suffix ceases to be a noun inflection and turns into the second-person singular verb ending, so that the same sound is repeated in a different grammatical unit. The ghazal is found in all four manuscripts, F, M, S and Ü, and stands in the section of the letter Nûn in the Divan. It is not known to whom it was written.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The poem describes a lover caught between the beloved's indifference and the presence of the rival. The opening couplet begins with a wish: if only the beloved would remember her once and see the wounds in her heart. What opens the wounds is the beloved's "tîr-i ġamze", the arrow of her languid glance. In divan poetry the beloved's glance is an arrow, her lashes arrows or daggers, and the lover's breast the target of these arrows; Mihrî enlarges this familiar picture with the phrase "yüz yüz yâre" (hundreds upon hundreds of wounds). In the second couplet the eye is on stage again, this time as "ḫûn-rîz", a bloodshedding tyrant. The fact that this eye, which drinks the lover's blood, does not look after its "âvâre" (wanderer) builds a closeness of sound and sense between the words göz (eye) and gözetmek (to look after).

The third couplet holds the finest invention of the ghazal. The beloved's cheek is likened to a rose petal, in divan poetry "gül ṣafḥası" (the rose's page); the fine down on the cheek, the haṭ, is the black writing on this page. The poet ties this blackness to the smoke rising from the lovers' sighs. This way of speaking, which sets the real cause aside and offers a poetic one, is a fine example of the art of hüsn-i ta‘lil (fantastic etiology). Gülşen Kaya gives the couplet among the examples of places in the Divan where the cheek is called a "rose page". A congruence of images (tenasüp) is also made between "ṣafḥa" and "ḫaṭ" through the association of writing and page.

The fourth couplet is a harsher word than is often seen in Mihrî's poems. The rival is called "kelb", dog, in the customary insult of divan poetry; the lover says that she will either drive him from the beloved's door or cut him to morsels. There is also a link between the dog simile and the word "loḳma", since a morsel is thrown to a dog. In this couplet anger interrupts for a moment the lover's voice, full of entreaties. The closing couplet ties the word back to submission: Mihrî addresses herself, admits that the only remedy is to give her life on the beloved's road, and asks how long she will plead with the rivals. In this way the poem gives, within a short frame, a state of mind that swings between anger and surrender.

The manuscript differences hardly change the sense. In the second couplet the F and S manuscripts read "ideyim", the M manuscript "eyleyem". In Didem Havlioğlu's electronic text the ghazal stands at number 136, based on the Istanbul manuscript alone; there the last line is in the form "Yâriçün aġyâra varup nice bir yalvaresin".

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Mehmet Arslan (ed.), Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları (Kültür Eserleri Dizisi 576), 2018, pp. 120-121, Ghazal 133 (F 60b, M 85b, S 62b, Ü 58a). ekitap.ktb.gov.tr

Academic studies

  • Gülşen Kaya, Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı'nın Tahlili, master's thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2010, p. 170. openaccess.firat.edu.tr

Other sources

  • Didem Havlioğlu (ed.), "Ğazeliyyāt-ı Mihri-i Hāqīre", türkoloji-iran, 2007 (a different transliteration of the ghazal, ghazal 136).

Online sources