Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Ebrûsı nice hâcib ola hüsni bagına
Almış iki harâmiyi yatur kucagına

In English

1. How can his eyebrow be doorkeeper to the garden of his beauty? It has taken two highwaymen (that is, the eyes) and lays them in its lap.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The whole wit of the couplet is gathered in the word "hâcib". This word of Arabic origin means both eyebrow and doorkeeper, chamberlain; at court the official who kept the ruler's door and decided who might enter was also called hâcib. The poet lays the two meanings one over the other. The beloved's face is a "hüsn bağı", a garden of beauty, and the eyebrow stands at the gate of this garden. But the eyebrow that ought to be its guard has taken two thieves and lays them in its lap. In divan poetry the eyes, which sit just beneath the brow and steal hearts, are often called harami, highwaymen. That "iki harâmî" here means the eyes is a reading drawn from this settled comparison; the text does not say so outright.

Read this way, the couplet tells a small story: the watchman charged with protecting the garden is in league with the thieves who prey on it. The lover who looks at the beauty's face can find no safety under the eyebrow's protection, for the eyes that steal his heart shelter in its shade. The question in the first line is less an expression of surprise than a reproach. Both lines end in the sound "-ına"; "bagına" and "kucagına" rhyme, and a couplet whose two lines rhyme marks the opening (matla) of a ghazal; none of the ghazal's other couplets has survived.

The couplet is the last line of Hüsameddin's quotation from Mecdî Mehmed Efendi. Translating Taşköprülüzâde's Şakâyık into Turkish in the sixteenth century, Mecdî tells a story he heard from the poet's descendants and says that he saw the Turkish divan of a thousand ghazals written in the poet's own hand, and that this opening couplet comes from it. Since the divan could not be found, the couplet is given as printed in Hüsameddin's edition. Nothing indicates when it was composed. The poet's path from the judgeship to his lodge in Bursa, and his family, are the subject of the biography Niyâzî (Şücâeddîn İlyas Çelebi).

Bibliography

Online sources