Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Çalınur çengler ayalar ḳarṣılur
Raḳṣ urur raḳḳâṣ çardaḳ ṣarṣılur

In English

1. The harps are played, palms are struck together (hands are clapped); the dancer dances, the pavilion shakes.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The Matla Sehî Praised

Only Sehî Beg recorded this couplet of harps, clapping hands and a shaking pavilion. In the Heşt Bihişt it is quoted as one of the opening couplets (matla) that Murad II spoke in conversation on the spur of the moment ("ale'l-fevr"), and the anthologist judges it thus:

Ve bu matla' sehlü'l-mümteni' kısmındandur. Mümteni'ü'n-nazîrdür.

In English: This matla belongs to the kind that seems easy to say but whose like cannot be said; it has no equal. Sehl-i mümteni ("the easy-impossible") is the name divan literature gives to a manner of expression that looks plain and fluent yet is very hard to imitate. Latîfî and Kınalızâde quote other couplets of Murad II but not this one; it is also absent from the examples in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü. The text is given in standard transliteration rather than in the distinctive letter marks of the Sehî edition.

Sound and Movement

The whole force of the couplet lies in its verbs. Five separate actions follow one another in two lines: the harps are played, hands are clapped, the dancer dances, the pavilion shakes. No adjective, simile or conventional image (mazmun) is used; the gathering is given not as a picture but as a moment in motion. The passive verbs ("çalınur", "karsılur", "sarsılur") hide the doers, and the sound of a crowded gathering comes onto the stage. This plainness makes Sehî's verdict of "sehl-i mümteni" understandable.

The inner pattern of sound is dense as well. The sounds "r", "k" and "s" recur in "raks", "rakkâs" and "sarsılur"; in "raks urur rakkâs" two words from the same root stand side by side, an example of the figure called cinas-ı iştikak (derivational paronomasia). The rhyme "karsılur" with "sarsılur" binds the two lines together. We have understood "ayalar karsılur" as the striking of palms together, that is, clapping; since the word does not survive in today's language, this reading should not be taken as certain.

Form

A matla is the first couplet of a ghazal, rhyming within itself; the rest of this ghazal is unknown. The redif is the suffix "-ılur". The lines scan as "fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün" of the remel metre of aruz, with the first foot in the form "feilâtün". Sehî names no metre, so the scansion is ours. The long syllable of "rakkâs" in the second line is read, as the metre requires, as worth a syllable and a half.

Historical Context

Sehî describes Murad II as "gâyet mertebede ayyâş", a sultan of pleasant nature, refined disposition and accustomed to reciting poetry. A gathering scene with harps and dancers set under a pavilion is the exact counterpart of this description. According to the words of Ibn Taghribirdi quoted in Halil İnalcık's article in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Murad loved entertainers and musicians, and musicians flocked to him from every quarter. Which gathering the couplet belongs to, however, is not known. Murâdî (Sultan Murad II): Poet and Works covers the poet's other poems and the state of the sources in detail.

Bibliography

Online sources