Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Vezin: Mefâ‘îlün Mefâ‘îlün Fa‘ûlün

Göñül vireli sen nâ-mihribâna
Teraḥḥum ḳılmaduñ bir demde câna
Olaldan ‘aşḳun ile cân yoldaş
Enîsüm ġam olupdur ġuṣṣa ḫâne
Ayaġın öpmege sen serv-i nâzuñ
Gözümüñ yaşı olmışdur revâne
Raḳîbe la‘l-i nâbuñ ṣun ḳo ‘âşıḳ
Ciger ḳanını içsün ḳana ḳana
İçürür çarḫ elinden ‘âdetidür
Kime şerbet kime zehri zamâne
Düşelden ‘aşḳuñuñ nârına Mihrî
Vücûdın maḥv ḳıldı yana yana

In English

1. Since I gave my heart to you, the pitiless beloved, you have not shown my soul mercy for a single moment.

2. Since my soul became the companion of your love, grief has become my intimate friend and sorrow my home.

3. To kiss the foot of you, graceful cypress, the tears of my eyes have set out and are flowing away. (In divan poetry the cypress grows by running water; because the beloved's stature is likened to a cypress, the lover's tears become a stream flowing toward the beloved's foot. Revân means both "flowing" and "set out on the road.")

4. Offer the wine of your pure-ruby lip to the rival and leave the lover alone; let him drink the blood of his own liver to his fill. (The red lip and the red wine are both called "la‘l-i nâb," pure ruby; what remains for the lover is his liver, turned to blood by pain.)

5. Fate makes one drink from its own hand; it is its habit: time gives some sherbet and some poison.

6. Since Mihrî fell into the fire of your love, she has burned and burned away her very being.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The 165th ghazal (gazel) of Mihrî Hatun's divan has six couplets (beyit) and is composed in the hezec metre in the pattern "Mefâ‘îlün Mefâ‘îlün Fa‘ûlün". Because it keeps the lines short and fluid, this pattern is among the best loved in divan poetry. The ghazal uses no separate redif (refrain word); the rhyme (kafiye) is built on the sound "-ân" followed by a vowel "-a/-e": nâ-mihribâna, câna, ḫâne, revâne, ḳana ḳana, zamâne, yana yana. As the form of the ghazal requires, both lines of the first couplet rhyme (matla), while in the following couplets only the second lines repeat the sound; in the last couplet the poet mentions her pen name (makta). The poem is found in all four manuscripts (F, M, S, Ü), with only a small difference of the "‘aşḳuñuñ / ‘aşḳınuñ" kind in the last couplet. There is no information on whom or on what occasion it was written for.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The subject of the ghazal is unrequited love wearing the lover down step by step. The word "nâ-mihribân" (pitiless, loveless) in the first couplet comes from the same root, "mihr", as the poet's pen name "Mihrî". In Persian, mihr means both the sun and love and tenderness; the poet who calls the beloved "nâ-mihribân" and then names herself "Mihrî" in the last couplet builds a bridge of sound and meaning between the beginning and the end of the ghazal. The beloved who lacks love is thus set face to face with the lover who bears the name of love.

In the second couplet the lover's new life is described like a household arrangement: the soul has become the companion of love, grief has become its "enîs" (friend, intimate companion), and sorrow its home. When examining images of grief in Mihrî's divan, Gülşen Kaya summarizes this idea as: once the lover has taken love as a companion, her friend is grief and her house is sorrow. The third couplet rests on the old relation between the cypress and running water. The beloved's stature is a "serv-i nâz", a graceful cypress; since the cypress is raised beside water, the lover's tears turn into a stream flowing toward it. The word "revân" is also known in divan poetry from the compound "serv-i revân" (swaying cypress); using it here for flowing tears creates a congruence of images (tenasüp) between the cypress and water.

The fourth couplet is the bitterest of the ghazal. The beloved's "la‘l-i nâb", the pure-ruby-coloured lip or wine, will be offered to the rival, while the lover will drink the blood of her own liver "kana kana". In divan poetry the liver is the place where pain gathers, and drinking liver-blood stands for suffering great grief. The reduplication "ḳana ḳana" gives the sense of "to one's fill" and, by repeating the word "ḳan" (blood), strengthens the couplet's bloody image. The reduplication "yana yana" in the last couplet is built in the same way; the two reduplications answer one another in the rhyme position.

The fifth couplet moves out of the private love story to a general judgment: fate (felek), that is time and fortune, gives everyone to drink from its own hand, offering sherbet to some and poison to others. Kaya cites this couplet among the examples in Mihrî's divan of time's unchanging habit, noting that time gladdens some and brings others into disfavour. Setting sherbet and poison against each other in the same line is antithesis (tezat); the verb "içürür" ties the couplet to the drinking image of the previous one.

In the makta couplet love is a fire, and Mihrî, having fallen into it, has burned away her being. Kaya counts this couplet among those in which love is described as fire and recalls that burning to nothing in the fire of love lies close to the Sufi idea of "fenâ" (annihilation). The image of the moth falling into the candle flame is not named in the couplet, but the lover who falls into the fire and is consumed rests on the same tradition. That the ghazal came from the pen of a woman poet makes no difference in how the beloved is addressed; here Mihrî uses the common lover's voice of divan poetry.

Bibliography

  • Mehmet Arslan (ed.), Mihrî Hâtun Dîvânı, Ankara: T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları (Kültür Eserleri Dizisi 576), 2018, p. 137, Ghazal 165 (F 65b, M 92a, S 67b, Ü 65a). ekitap.ktb.gov.tr
  • Gülşen Kaya, Mihrî Hâtun Divânı'nın Tahlili, master's thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2010, pp. 230, 263, 273. openaccess.firat.edu.tr