Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün mefâîlün (the sources do not give it; derived from the lines)

The form in Kınalızâde's edition:

Bihâr-ı eşküme gark eyleyüp deryâ-yı cûşânı
Göze yindürdüm ey dil hâsılı bahr-ı firâvânı

The form in Beyânî:

Bihâr-ı eşküme gark eyledüm deryâ-yı cûşânı
Göze yendürdün ey dil hâsılı bahr-ı firâvânı

In English

1. Drowning the surging sea in the seas of my tears, O heart, in the end I made that boundless sea yield to the "göz", that is, to the spring of tears. (In Beyânî's reading the first line becomes "I drowned the surging sea in the seas of my tears" and the second "O heart, in the end you made that wide sea yield to the spring"; in this reading it is the heart that defeats the sea.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Niyâzî sets his tears against the seas in this couplet and lets the tears win. In divan poetry the lover's tears already become a river, a flood, a sea; here the exaggeration goes one step further. Such extreme magnification is called gulüv, the highest degree of hyperbole (mübalağa). "Bihâr" means seas and is used in the plural: the lover has not one sea of tears but many. The surging sea falls into these seas and sinks. To all appearances the real sea is great and the tears small; the couplet turns that measure upside down.

The phrase "Göze yindürdüm" in the second line is the knot of the couplet. "Yindürmek" is the causative of the verb "to defeat": to make one thing be defeated by another. The word "göz" means the eye on one side and, on the other, in popular speech the spring where water wells up from the ground, the "göze". The sea has been defeated by a spring, and that spring is the lover's eye. The play between the word's two meanings is close to double entendre (tevriye). The sources do not explain this reading; the syntax of the couplet and the comparison between tears and sea support it. "Firâvân" means abundant and wide; the phrase "bahr-ı firâvân" heightens the surprise of the defeat by stressing the size of the sea.

The differences in Beyânî look small but change the sense. In Kınalızâde the one who acts is the poet himself, and he addresses the heart: "O heart, I made the sea yield to the eye." In Beyânî the first line is again built in the first person, while the second addresses the heart and says "yendürdün", you made it yield; it is the heart that defeats the sea. Which reading came from Niyâzî's pen is unknown; since Beyânî's text appears to be abridged from Kınalızâde's entry, Kınalızâde has been taken as the basis of the translation. There the couplet stands under the heading "Diğer" (another), one after the other with Niyâzî's other couplets; the rhyme of both lines on "-ânı" indicates that it too may be the first couplet of a lost ghazal. For the poet's life, see Niyâzî Abdürrahîm Efendi.

Bibliography

Online sources