Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün

Lebüñden geçdi vardı zülfüñe dil
Bir iken iki oldı baña müşkil

In English

1. The heart passed beyond your lips and reached your curling locks; from one it became two, and that was hard for me. ("From one becoming two" can be understood as the heart being split and thrown into disarray; this is our reading.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The eighth muamma (name riddle) of the edition is a single couplet in the metre "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün"; the lines rhyme on "dil" and "müşkil". The muammas are found in all three manuscripts of the divan (VT 179b-180b, VY 151a-152b, Ü 63b-65b) in the same order; only in Ü are the 10th and 11th muammas transposed, and the 12th muamma and those after it are missing from Ü.

The edition's heading gives the solution as "Mu‘ammā-yı Dede"; Ersoy cites the name in his introduction as "Dede". Who Dede was is not stated.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet describes the heart's wandering over the beloved's face as a short journey: it passes the lips and reaches the locks. In divan poetry the locks are the place of disarray and dispersal; the heart that reaches them "becoming two from one" seems tied to this disarray. There is a clear congruence of images (tenasüp) among "leb" (lip), "zülf" (lock) and "dil" (heart), and "one" and "two" form an antithesis.

The edition does not show how the riddle is solved. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that muammas exploit the likeness in shape between parts of the body and letters, the lock (zülf), for example, corresponding to the letter dâl. The word "zülf" occurs in the couplet, and the phrase "from one it became two" may point to a letter being doubled; the name Dede in the solution contains two dâls. But since we cannot reconstruct the whole name letter by letter, we record this only as a clue (our reading).

Bibliography

Online sources