Original Persian Text

Metre: fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün

Eşk-i bī-āġāz u encām-ı Münīr
Baḥr-i ḫūn-rā mī-koned mā-rā esīr

In English

1. Münîr's tears, without beginning or end (never ceasing), make us captives of a sea of blood. (The edition gives no meaning for this Persian couplet; the translation is ours. Because of the two "-rā" suffixes in the second line, the reading "make the sea of blood and us captive" is also possible.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The sixth muamma (name riddle) of the edition is in Persian. Ersoy writes in his introduction that all the muammas but one are in Turkish, and the TDV states that the divan contains "seventeen muammas, one of them Persian"; this couplet, built with Persian verbs and suffixes such as "mī-koned" and "mā-rā", is that Persian muamma. Ersoy gives the meanings of Persian couplets in his apparatus but has not given the meaning of this one. The metre is "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün", the rhyme words "Münīr" and "esīr". 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 "Şükrī"; Ersoy cites the name in his introduction as "Şükri".

Meaning and Figures of Speech

On its surface the couplet says that the poet's tears have become a sea of blood; the pen name (mahlas) appears in the first line. The Kubbealtı Lugatı explains "eşk" as tear and, in the entry "serencam", the word "encām" as end, outcome. "Bī-āġāz u encām" (without beginning or end) says that the tears never stop.

In the muamma tradition the phrase also carries a signal value. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi notes that words such as "âgāz" are used to point to the first letter of a word, and words such as "âhir, âkıbet" to its last letter. On this basis, taking "şk" from the word "eşk" (اشك) with its first letter dropped, and "r" from the last letter of the name Münîr, yields the part "şükr" of the solution. We cannot show where the final letter "ī" comes from; our reading is therefore partial and our own.

Bibliography

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