Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilâtün Fe‘ilün

İçelim bâdeyi bâ-nâm-ı Hudâ ey sâkî
İdelim mest be-ân nâm nidâ ey sâkî
Allâh Allâh diyelim mest be-âvâz-ı bülend
İdelim rûhı be-ân nâm fedâ ey sâkî

In English

1. O cupbearer, let us drink the wine in the name of God; with that name, drunk, let us call out.

2. Drunk, let us say "Allah, Allah" in a loud voice; O cupbearer, let us sacrifice our souls to that name.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Nigârî's Turkish divan opens with the basmala and, immediately after it, with this quatrain. That the first word is addressed to a cupbearer (sâkî) is no accident. As Pervane Bayram shows in her article on the arrangement of the divan, the poet placed two rubais addressing the cupbearer before his ghazals begin, then inserted two more rubais each time a letter's run of ghazals came to an end, and closed the ghazal section with three rubais instead of two. All of these rubais are small sâkînâmes (poems to the cupbearer). Earlier poets had also set rubais among their ghazals; Bayram mentions Rumi, Nâbî and Neccârzâde Rızâ, a Naqshbandi poet. But marking the end of every letter regularly with a pair of cupbearer rubais is, in Bayram's view, Nigârî's own invention.

From beginning to end the quatrain turns on the name of God. The wine is drunk "in the name of God", the voice raised by intoxication calls out that name, and the soul is sacrificed to it. In Sufi poetry wine stands for divine love and the cupbearer for the spiritual guide who offers it; as Nigârî says in another couplet, this is a wine drunk "without lips and without a cup". The first quatrain of the divan thus also tells the reader at the outset how the tavern language of the poems is to be read.

The "âvâz-ı bülend", the loud voice of the third line, deserves a separate thought. The Naqshbandi path mostly practises silent remembrance of God (zikr). Here, however, the drunken company is asked to say "Allah, Allah" aloud. The Amasya historian Hüsameddin writes that Nigârî's syllabic poems were recited by his disciples to special melodies, in ecstasy and fervour; the line fits that lively gathering, but we have no further evidence for saying that the quatrain describes a particular method of zikr.

What makes the quatrain resemble a rubai is its rhyme scheme; the metre goes another way. The edition reads it not in the akhrab and akhram patterns of the classical rubai but in the ramal pattern "fe‘ilâtün fe‘ilâtün fe‘ilâtün fe‘ilün". The first, second and fourth lines, on the other hand, rhyme on "Hudâ, nidâ, fedâ" and share the refrain "ey sâkî" (O cupbearer), while the third is left free, which is the familiar arrangement of the rubai.

Bibliography

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Academic studies

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