Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fe‘ilātün mefā‘ilün fe‘ilün

N’eyler ol yüzde ey ‘aceb burḳa‘
K’ol durur āftāba ḫod maṭla‘
Ġamzeñ oḳın görüp cigerde didüm
Bu da ḫoş küllü dāḫilin yenfa‘
Kān-ı ‘ışḳ-ı to şod dilem ki be-derd
Şod derūn-ı men ey ṣanem menba‘
Şāh-beyt-i cemāl-i ḥüsn oldı
Ḫaṭ-ı la‘lüñ düşüp iki mıṣra‘
Cān vir ol la‘le dir Münīrī daḫı
Yā fu’ādī kelāmenā isma‘

In English

1. How strange; what need has that face of a veil? That face is itself the place where the sun rises. ("Maṭla‘" means both the place of rising and the opening couplet of a ghazal.)

2. Seeing the arrow of your glance in my liver I said: this too is pleasant; "everything that enters brings benefit." (The end of the second line is Arabic; Ersoy gives no meaning for this couplet, and the rendering is ours.)

3. (Persian) O idol-like beauty, through pain my heart has become the mine of your love, and my inner self has become a spring. (Our rendering rests on the same interpretation as Ersoy's meaning in the apparatus.)

4. The down around your ruby lip, falling like two lines of verse, has become the finest couplet (şah beyit) of the beauty of the face.

5. Münîrî too says "give your life to that ruby lip": "O my heart, listen to our word." (The second line is Arabic.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a five-couplet ghazal (gazel) and is the hundred and forty-second of the Turkish ghazals in the edition (tg 142). It is a ghazal in which Turkish, Persian and Arabic are mixed: Ersoy gives the meaning for the third couplet (Persian) and for the second line of the fifth couplet (Arabic), but not for the Arabic phrase at the end of the second line of the second couplet. The metre is "fe‘ilātün mefā‘ilün fe‘ilün". The ghazal has no refrain (redif); the rhyme is the "-a‘" sound: burḳa‘, maṭla‘, yenfa‘, menba‘, mıṣra‘ and isma‘. According to Ersoy's count of rhyme letters, there are three Turkish ghazals in the divan that rhyme in the letter ayn; they are tg 142, 143 and 144, which follow one another in the edition. This sequence is our own observation. The ghazal is found only in the Vatican manuscript (VT 131b). To whom and when it was written is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The distinctive feature of the ghazal is that it turns the technical terms of poetry itself into a description of beauty. The word "maṭla‘" in the opening couplet (matla) is a double entendre (tevriye): it means the place where the sun rises, but it is also the name of the opening couplet of a ghazal. The poet counts the beloved's face as the place where the sun rises and says that this face has no need of a veil; and he says this in the matla of the ghazal. The fourth couplet follows the same path: the down around the lip is likened to two lines of verse, and becomes the "şāh-beyt", the choicest couplet, of the beauty of the face. The use of the terms matla, line (mısra) and choicest couplet in this way within a ghazal is our own observation.

In the second couplet the lover welcomes the arrow of the glance lodged in his liver. The phrase at the end of the line, "küllü dāḫilin yenfa‘", means word for word "everything that enters brings benefit". Since Ersoy gives no meaning for this phrase, our reading is a rendering of our own; we have not been able to verify whether the phrase is a set saying. The lover welcoming an arrow wound as a cure is a familiar example of the lover's attitude that counts pain as a blessing.

In the third, Persian couplet the heart becomes, through pain, the mine of love, and the inner self a "menba‘" (spring). Mine and spring both describe something precious that comes forth the more one digs; pain digs into the heart and draws love out of it. This last interpretation is our own inference.

The pen-name couplet (mahlas) joins two languages. The first line is Turkish and gives the voice of the poet saying "give your life to that ruby lip"; the second line is Arabic and means "O my heart, listen to our word". The poet's counselling his own heart with an address in Arabic brings the tone of the couplet close to the gravity of a sermon or a prayer.

Bibliography

Online sources