Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: mef'ûlü fâilâtü mefâîlü fâilün (the metre is our identification)

Kınalızâde's version:

Mümkin mi ana mîve-i vaslun ola nasîb
Bâg-ı visâlde tam’-ı hâm ider rakîb

Beyânî's version, with a small difference in spelling:

Mümkin mi ana mîve-i vaslun ola nasîb
Bâg-ı visâlde tama-ı hâm ider rakîb

In English

1. Can the fruit of union with you ever fall to his lot? In the garden of union the rival indulges a vain greed, eyeing the unripe fruit.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Niyâzî looks at the rival with a gardener's eye. In divan poetry the rival (rakîb) is the man who wants to share the lover's beloved, and he is nearly always drawn as coarse, jealous, someone who has set his eye on a place he does not deserve; in this couplet that place is a garden. Union is a garden, and attaining the beloved is that garden's fruit. The rival too has entered the garden and reached for the fruit. The poet's question is mocking: can that fruit fall to his lot? The second line gives the answer.

The phrase "tama'-ı hâm" is the key of the couplet. "Tama'" is greed, cherishing a hope; "hâm" means raw, unripe. As an idiom "tama'-ı hâm" is a vain hope, an expectation that will never come true. But beside the words garden and fruit, "hâm" also returns to its literal meaning: the rival has set his eye on fruit that is not yet ripe. Mîve (fruit), bâğ (garden) and hâm thus form a congruence of images (tenasüp), and the figurative sense of the idiom and the literal sense of the word work at the same time. It is implied that one must ripen to deserve union with the beloved, and that the rival lacks this ripeness. The couplet does not say this last thing outright; we draw it from the way the words sit side by side.

Kınalızâde gives the couplet as the third and last of those headed "Diğer" in the entry on Niyâzî; Beyânî keeps the same order. Since the rhyme of "nasîb" and "rakîb" binds both lines, it is an opening couplet (matla). The only difference between the two texts is in spelling: Kınalızâde writes "tam’-ı hâm", Beyânî "tama-ı hâm". The pronunciation and meaning do not change. The rest of the ghazal to which the couplet belonged is not known, nor is it recorded to whom it was addressed. Niyâzî's brief life and his place in the tezkires are told in his biography.

Bibliography

Online sources