Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Safâ-hâtır eyleyüp benüm ey seng-dil gönlüm
Mukarrer pây-dâr olmaz gönülsüz yapılan bünyâd

In English

1. O stone-hearted one, cheer my heart (build up my heart); a building raised without heart is surely not lasting.

Literary and Historical Commentary

On the Idiom "Gönül Yapmak"

Inside the Turkish idiom "gönül yapmak", literally "to build a heart", that is, to please someone, Remzî raises a whole piece of architecture. The beloved is "seng-dil", stone-hearted, and stone is a building material. The lover asks her to cheer his heart, that is, to "build" his heart. The second line speaks like a proverb: a building raised without heart does not last. "Gönülsüz" has two meanings. One is "reluctantly, grudgingly": work done unwillingly does not endure. The other is the literal sense of the word: a structure with no heart inside it does not stand. The implication is that if the beloved does not build up the lover's heart, the bond between them will also be left without foundation.

Bünyâd (foundation, building), pây-dâr (standing, lasting) and seng (stone) call one another up; all the images of the couplet come from the builder's language. Kınalızâde gives this couplet as the last example in his entry on Remzî. The couplet is not an opening couplet, so it was chosen from the middle or end of its ghazal; the other couplets of that ghazal are not available.

Whose Couplet

Kınalızâde's Remzî is the son of a merchant of Bursa; Hüsameddin's Remzî is the son of Şemseddîn Ahmed, judge of Amasya. What joins the two is the judgeship of Galata and their poet son İlmî. If these two shared points are enough for a single identity, the couplet belongs to Remzî of Amasya; if not, it stays recorded under the name of a judge from Bursa.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Online sources