Original Persian Text

Metre: mef’ūlü mefā’īlü mefā’īlü fe’ūlün

Mestīm ü ḫarāb ey dil ez-īn bāde-i gül-reng
‘Aybī ne-buved ger be sürūdī konem āheng
Ber zīr ü bam-ı nāle-i ‘uşşāḳ-ı to māned
Feryād u fiġān kerden-i ḳānūn u ney ü çeng
Tīrī ki ez-ān ġamze resed ber cigerī rīş
Ez-behr-i vey üfted be-miyān-ı dil ü cān ceng
Çün çeng-i ḫamīde dil-i men zār be-nāled
Ber-rişte-i cānem ki ġam-ı ‘ışḳ-ı to zed çeng
Ez-dīde ne-reft ān ḫad ez-īn rūy ḫaṭ āverd
Ayīne ki ber-cāy-ı nem üfted resedeş jeng
Me’vā-yı ḫayāl-i to ez-ān çeşm-i Münīrest
Cüz-āteş-i ‘ışḳ-ı to ne-bāşed be-dil-i teng

In English

1. O heart, we are drunk and ruined from this rose-coloured wine; it would be no shame if I gave tune to a song. (In the Vatican manuscript "gül-berg", rose petal, is written instead of "gül-reng".)

2. The crying and moaning of the kanun, the ney and the harp resemble the high and low notes of the moaning of your lovers. ("Māned", in its dictionary sense, means both "resembles" and "remains, falls behind". Ersoy takes the second sense: beside the lovers' moaning, the outcry of the instruments falls out of pitch, that is, spoils the harmony.)

3. Because of the arrow that reaches a wounded liver from that sidelong glance, war breaks out between the heart and the soul.

4. Since the grief of your love has struck its claw into the string of my soul, my heart moans on like the bent harp. (The çeng is a stringed instrument with a curved body; "çeng zeden" means to strike with the claw.)

5. That cheek never left my eye; so it grew down: a mirror that falls in a damp place gathers rust. (Mirrors were once made of metal and rusted in damp; the eye's damp is its tears.)

6. This is why the refuge of your image is Münîr's eye: in the narrow heart there is nothing but the fire of your love.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a six-couplet ghazal (gazel) written in Persian; in the edition it is the ninety-first of the Persian ghazals (fg 91). The metre is "mef‘ûlü mefâ‘îlü mefâ‘îlü fe‘ûlün". The ghazal has no refrain (redif) and does not appear in Ersoy's list of refrains. The rhyme is the sound "-eng": reng, āheng, çeng, ceng, jeng, teng. The poem is found in the Vatican (VT 83b) and Vienna (VY 67a) manuscripts. According to Ersoy's apparatus, the word "gül-reng" in the first line of the opening couplet is written "gül-berg" in the Vatican manuscript. To whom and when it was written is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first half of the ghazal is a musical gathering. The drunken lover wants to give tune to a song; the kanun, the ney and the harp play; the lovers' moaning mingles with these instruments in its high and low notes. There is a broad congruence of images (tenasüp) among "sürūd" (song), "āheng" (tune), "zīr ü bam" (high and low note), "nāle" (moan), the names of the instruments and the "rişte" (string) of the fourth couplet. The verb "māned" in the second couplet can be read in two ways. Taken as "resembles", the outcry of the instruments resembles the lovers' moaning; taken as "falls behind", as in Ersoy's reading, the instruments lose their harmony beside the lovers' moaning. On both readings the lover's moan is stronger than the sound of the instruments.

Münîrî's love of paronomasia (cinas) shows plainly in the rhyme. The word "çeng" occurs in the ghazal with two separate senses: in the first line of the fourth couplet it is a curved-bodied instrument, in the second line, within the idiom "çeng zeden", it means a claw. Using two words of the same spelling with different senses is complete paronomasia (tam cinas). Besides this, "çeng" and "ceng" (war) in the third couplet differ by only one letter; the words "jeng" (rust) and "teng" (narrow) carry on the same sound pattern. A comparison is also felt between the bent harp and the lover's body bent double.

The third couplet makes the arrow of the glance a subject of dispute between the heart and the soul. The arrow reaching the liver sets off a war between heart and soul; the couplet suggests a quarrel over who will keep a precious prize. The fifth couplet, meanwhile, is an example of the figure of irsal-i mesel (supporting a claim with a proverb-like truth): the claim of the first line is supported in the second by a truth known to all. A mirror kept in a damp place gathers rust; the beloved's cheek, too, has grown down because it never left the lover's tearful eye. The cheek corresponds to the mirror, the down to the rust and the tears to the damp.

The pen-name couplet (mahlas) tells where the image dwells. The heart is narrow and full of the fire of love; therefore the beloved's image takes refuge in Münîr's eye. The eye being wet with tears may be thought of as a shelter set against the heart full of fire. The rhyme "teng" (narrow) closes the ghazal by carrying it from the wide and merry gathering of the opening couplet into a narrow heart.

Bibliography

Online sources