Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün

Āteş-i ġamda kebâb oldı ciger döne döne
Göklere çıḳdı duḫânumla şerer döne döne
Cân firâḳuñla fetîl oldı göñül ḫânesine
Ten ḫayâlüñle fenâr oldı yanar döne döne
Ḫâk-i pâyuña yüzin sürmek içün şems ü ḳamer
Ser-i kûyuña gelür şâm u seḥer döne döne
Ḳaşuña beñzemek içün senüñ ey Zühre-cebîn
Kendüzin ṭutdı hilâl itdi ḳamer döne döne
Cân cân-bâzını gör la‘lüñe irişmek içün
Rîsmân-ı ser-i zülfüñden iner döne döne
Düşeli şevḳi ḫayâl-i lebinüñ Mihrî dile
Āteş-i ġamda kebâb oldı ciger döne döne

In English

1. In the fire of grief my liver has turned into kebab, spinning round and round; with my smoke the sparks have risen to the heavens, whirling round and round. (The lover's sigh is imagined as the smoke and sparks rising from a burning liver.)

2. Through separation from you my soul has become a wick in the house of my heart; my body, through your image, has become a lantern and burns, turning round and round. (A wick burns inside a lantern; here the soul is the wick and the body the lantern around it.)

3. To rub their faces on the dust of your feet, the sun and the moon come at evening and at dawn to the head of your street, circling round and round. (The endless turning of sun and moon across the sky is read as their going to and fro at the beloved's door.)

4. O beloved with a brow bright as the planet Venus, to resemble your eyebrow the moon drew itself in and became a crescent, round and round. (The shrinking of the moon into a crescent is attributed to its effort to resemble the beloved's eyebrow.)

5. Look at this acrobat of the soul: to reach your lip, he descends from the rope of your tress, turning round and round. (The lover's soul is likened to a rope-walker; the hair hanging down the face is the acrobat's rope.)

6. O Mihrî, since longing for the image of the beloved's lip fell into my heart, my liver has turned into kebab in the fire of grief, round and round.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The 141st ghazal (gazel) of the divan stands in the section for the letter ha and has six couplets (beyit). It is written in the remel metre of the aruz (quantitative metre), in the pattern "Fe'ilâtün Fe'ilâtün Fe'ilâtün Fe'ilün". The redif (refrain word) is the reduplication "döne döne", and the rhyme is built on the sound "-er" (ciger, şerer, yanar, seḥer, ḳamer, iner). A notable feature of the ghazal is that the first line is repeated exactly as the second line of the last couplet; the poem thus returns to where it began, and this answers in form the idea of continual turning carried by the refrain. The ghazal appears in all four manuscripts (F 63b, M 89b, S 65b, Ü 59b); only the Ankara manuscript (M) lacks the last three couplets. The other variants are mostly minor differences of spelling; in the fourth couplet the F manuscript reads "Gündüzin" instead of "Kendüzin".

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The whole imagery of the poem is built on the meaning of the refrain. In each couplet the words "döne döne" attach to a different turning motion: in the opening couplet to the kebab turning on the skewer as it cooks and to the smoke rising in curls, in the second couplet to the burning lantern, in the third to the sun and moon revolving in the sky, in the fourth to the moon passing from phase to phase, in the fifth to the acrobat coming down the rope with a spin. The redif thus ceases to be a repeated formula and sets a new image in motion in every couplet. Mihrî's mastery in this ghazal shows most in this variety.

The first two couplets describe the lover's inner world with the words fire, smoke, wick and lantern; the use of these words together is a plain example of congruence of images (tenasüp). Gülşen Kaya cites the second couplet among the household objects and light sources in Mihrî's divan: the soul has become a wick through separation, the body burns like a lantern through the beloved's image. In the third and fourth couplets the familiar movements of the heavenly bodies are given a poetic cause. The daily rising and setting of the sun and moon is explained by their wish to rub their faces on the beloved's threshold, and the moon's becoming a crescent by its effort to resemble the beloved's eyebrow. Putting a beautiful cause in the place of the real one is called hüsn-i ta'lîl in divan poetry. In the fourth couplet the beloved is addressed as "Zühre-cebîn"; Kaya notes that in the divan Zühre (Venus) is used on the one hand for the dancing girl who plays an instrument at gatherings, and on the other, as in this compound, as an element of comparison for a radiant face.

The fifth couplet is the most original invention of the ghazal. The lover's soul is likened to a rope acrobat; the hair hanging down the beloved's face is the acrobat's rope, and at the end of the rope is the lip. Kaya recalls that the word "cân-bâz", because of its sense of one who plays with his life, is used for a lover ready at any moment to give his life for the beloved, and that the third murabba (four-line stanza form) in the divan is built on an acrobat named Haydar who performed at Eğribük. Acrobatic shows were a familiar entertainment in the city life of the period; Mihrî joined this image taken from daily life with the classical conceits of tress and lip. In the closing couplet the poet mentions her pen name (mahlas), returns to the line of the opening couplet, and ties the cause of all this burning to longing for the beloved's lip.

Historical Context

This ghazal is a nazire (response poem) to Necâtî Beg's ghazal with the refrain "döne döne", and it is Mihrî's most frequently cited poem. Necâtî's ghazal opens with the matla "Bu cefâdan ki ḳadeh aġzuñ öper döne döne / Nâr-ı ġayretde kebâb oldı ciger döne döne". Mihrî took the second line of Necâtî's opening couplet and moved it to the first line of her own poem, changing only the fire of jealousy (nâr-ı ġayret) to the fire of grief. Necâtî's couplet "Senseñ ol şâh-ı felek-mertebe kim leyl ü nehâr / Yüz sürer işigiñe şems ü ḳamer döne döne" finds its answer in Mihrî's third couplet with the same image of sun and moon. Metin Hakverdioğlu published the two ghazals side by side among the twenty responses Mihrî wrote to Necâtî.

In the entry on Mihrî in his tezkire (biographical anthology of poets), Latîfî says that the poet shows her invention and skill mostly in her naziras, and gives this verdict on the ghazal: many responses have been written to Necâtî's "döne döne" ghazal, but none of them can equal Mihrî's. The same record is repeated in the works of Âşık Çelebi, Kınalızâde Hasan Çelebi, Beyânî and Gelibolulu Âlî. Gönül Ayan notes that old and new sources agree in judging this nazire "the finest". In İbrahim Sona's study comparing the two ghazals it is also stated that Mihrî carried the poem further with the new meanings she found (as reported by Enes İlhan).

According to Latîfî, Necâtî was disturbed by this success and wrote for Mihrî the qit'a (short poem) beginning "Ey benüm şi'rüme naẓîre diyen". This account was accepted for a long time; but Enes İlhan found in one manuscript of Necâtî's Dîvân a note showing that the qit'a was addressed to Revânî, and he questioned the account. For this reason it is not certain that the qit'a was written for Mihrî. The ghazal itself is regarded as the best document of how far Mihrî could go as a poet who took Necâtî as her model, and it is among the rare examples of a woman poet who competed on the same ground as the best-known poem of the most famous ghazal master of the age and received from the tezkire writers a verdict of superiority.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

  • Metin Hakverdioğlu, "Mihrî Hâtun'un Necâtî Bey'in Şiirlerine Nazîreleri", Turkish Studies 4/2 (Winter 2009), pp. 522-551 (comparison: Necâtî CDLXVII / Mihrî CXLIII, by the number in the author's own edition, pp. 544-545), doi:10.7827/TurkishStudies.638.
  • Gönül Ayan, "Mihri Hatun ve Şiirleri", Erdem V/13 (1989), pp. 23-30 (pp. 28-29). https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/692920
  • Enes İlhan, "Mihrî Hâtun mu Revânî mi? 'Ey Benüm Şiirüme Nazire Diyen' Kim?", Hikmet - Akademik Edebiyat Dergisi 10/20 (2024), pp. 148-170. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/3697235
  • Gülşen Kaya, Mihrî Hâtun Divânı'nın Tahlili, master's thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2010 (entries on Necâtî, cân-bâz, lantern and Zühre). openaccess.firat.edu.tr

Online sources