Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Tur salın nâz ile ey serv-i gül-endâmum benüm
Sâye şeklin baglasun yanunca endâmum benüm
Hîç olur mı kim dehânun sırrı agzumdan çıka
Rind olam nâzik geçem Remzî ola nâmum benüm

In English

1. Rise and sway coquettishly, my rose-bodied cypress; let my body take the shape of a shadow and never leave your side.

2. Could it ever be that the secret of your mouth should escape from my mouth? Let me be a rind (a free spirit), let me pass for refined; let my name be Remzî.

Literary and Historical Commentary

A Signature Couplet That Plays on the Pen Name

"Remz" means sign, allusion and secret; Remzî is "one who speaks by signs, who keeps secrets", and the signature couplet turns that meaning onto the poet's own name. Kınalızâde took only the first and last couplets of this ghazal, but together they say enough to show how the poet used his pen name. In the signature couplet the lover says he will not let the secret of the beloved's mouth slip from his own. In divan poetry the beloved's mouth is imagined as too small to be seen, and it counts as a secret or a nothingness. The poet will keep this secret, because his name is Remzî: one who does not divulge a secret but tells it only by signs. The meeting in one line of the Persian "dehân" and the Turkish "agız", two words for the same thing, also builds at the level of words the tension between secrecy and disclosure. The words "Rind olam, nâzik geçem" draw the portrait of a man of the gatherings who cares nothing for the world yet keeps his refinement.

Cypress and Shadow

The opening couplet imagines the beloved as a rose-bodied cypress and the lover as that cypress's shadow. The cypress is a tall, swaying tree, and its shadow cannot leave its side. The lover wishes that his body might take the shape of a shadow and stay beside the beloved. The redif (refrain word) is "benüm" (mine), and the rhyme is formed between "gül-endâmum" and "endâmum", the same word used once in a compound and once alone; the likeness of sound mirrors the inseparability of the cypress and its shadow.

Source and Authorship

The owner of this ghazal in Kınalızâde's entry is, in Kınalızâde's own words, the father of "Remzîzâde" İlmî. The tezkire writer presents this father as the son of a merchant of Bursa, Hüsameddin as the son of Şemseddîn Ahmed Efendi, judge of Amasya. The two presentations give one father two different lineages; for the ghazal to stand among the poets of Amasya, one has to suppose that they are two different accounts of the same man.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Online sources