Nazîf: A Poet of Unknown Identity in the Merzifon Cönkü

Nazîf, with ten poems in the Merzifon Cönkü and no trace in other sources: his koşma, his ghazals of admonition and the question of Nazîfî in the Amasya Cönkü.

Nazîf is a poet whose name occurs only in the Merzifon Cönkü. The article Metin Hakverdioğlu published in 2019 records that the cönk contains ten poems under this pen name, but gives no information about the poet. No record has been found in any other source that can be matched with this poet with certainty; his identity, the place where he lived and his century are unknown. This page brings together his poems in the cönk and the limited information that can be drawn from them.

Poems in the Merzifon Cönkü

By Hakverdioğlu's count, the cönk contains ten poems under Nazîf's name, one in syllabic metre and nine in aruz. The syllabic poem is a koşma that, with the refrain "kara gözlüm" (my dark-eyed one), combines the pain of love with the fear of exile; its language is very close to folk songs. The aruz poems are all ghazals and are recorded one after another on pages 66-73 of the cönk. As far as their opening couplets show, most of these ghazals are not love poems but poems of religious and moral admonition: they treat ideas such as that the world is not worth even an akçe, that one cannot know what has meaning in the transient world, that all that comes and goes is something "Allâh bilür" (God knows), that man tears down the house of the heart and God rebuilds it, that the candle of guidance and the sword of the sharia always shine, and that without gnosis one cannot attain divine grace. The two lines given in the article for one of the ghazals do not rhyme; this suggests that the opening couplet of that poem may not have been given.

The article published only the first verse units of these poems. Each is given on a separate page in this category, with its original text, a modern Turkish rendering and commentary. The full texts are in the cönk itself and have not been published.

Connection with Amasya

Nazîf's only known connection with Amasya is that his poems appear in this cönk, which is thought to have been compiled in Merzifon. Hakverdioğlu states that he obtained the cönk from Merzifon and, on the basis of signs within it, thinks that it was compiled by a poet from the literary circle of Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon, most probably Fethî. That nine consecutive pages of the cönk are given to Nazîf may show that the compiler took a special interest in this poet or copied his poems together from a single source; but this is a guess.

State of the Sources and Discussion

No information has been found linking the poems in the cönk to a known poet. When introducing another cönk of the Amasya region, the Amasya Cönkü published by Şahin Köktürk in 2007, Hakverdioğlu names Nazîfî among the poets with poems in it. Whether Nazîfî and Nazîf are the same person is not known, and the similarity of the two names is not enough by itself for an identification; still, the appearance of a similar pen name in two Amasya cönks is a small sign suggesting that the poet was read in this region. The religious and moral content of the ghazals brings to mind that the poet may have come from a madrasa or dervish lodge milieu, but there is no document to support this.