Original Arabic Text

Metre: not stated in the source

روضة نورت حمائلها
وجرت بينها جداولها

Ravżatun nevverat ḥamā’iluhā
Ve ceret beynehā cedāviluhā

قد خلا بالنا عن البلبال
إذ تغنت بنا بلابلها

Ḳad ḫalā bālunā ‘ani’l-belbāl
İẕ teġannet binā belābiluhā

شابهت نزهة لجنات
بنسيم الصبا عنادلها

Şābehet nüzheten li-cennātin
Bi-nesīmi’ṣ-ṣabā ‘anādiluhā

كقصور الجنان أشجارها
وأزاهيرها قنادلها

Ke-ḳuṣūri’l-cinān eşcāruhā
Ve ezāhīruhā ḳanādiluhā

In English

1. It is a garden whose stretches, laid out like sword belts, have burst into flower, and between them its streams run.

2. When its nightingales sang to us, our hearts were freed of care.

3. In beauty and pleasantness it came to resemble the gardens of paradise, and its nightingales the morning breeze.

4. Its trees are like the palaces of paradise, and its flowers like the lamps of those palaces. (According to Hüsameddin's translation the garden is Amasya; the name of the city does not occur in the Arabic text.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

This is an Arabic kıt‘a (fragment) of four couplets. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddin Yasar gives it in the first volume of his Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), saying that he took it from Tâcîzâde Sa'dî Çelebi's Arabic work Hayrü'l-ahlâm, and calls it a "kıt‘a-i belîga", an eloquent fragment. Every line ends with the sound "-iluhā": ḥamā’iluhā, cedāviluhā, belābiluhā, ‘anādiluhā, ḳanādiluhā. Since both lines of the first couplet carry this rhyme, the piece may be the opening of a longer poem in the book, or a short poem that begins with a matla (rhyming opening couplet). The metre is not stated in the source. The first line fits the pattern "Fā‘ilātün Mefā‘ilün Fe‘ilün" of the khafif metre of Arabic prosody; the unvowelled text of the edition is not enough to scan the other lines with certainty.

Hüsameddin gives the fragment in Arabic script and then adds a Turkish prose translation in two paragraphs. The Latin-script reading under the original text is ours. The English rendering has been made from the Arabic text and compared with Hüsameddin's translation.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The fragment is the description of a garden. The first couplet gives the look of the garden: long strips in flower and streams running between them. The word "ḥamā’il" means a sword belt worn slung across the shoulder. Hüsameddin explains it as "a place long and wide like sword belts embroidered with gold thread"; the way vineyards and gardens stretch in strips along a valley suits such a comparison. The second couplet turns from the garden to people: when the nightingales sing, no care is left in the heart. In this couplet there is a pun (cinas) based on the likeness of sound between "belbāl" (care, unrest of the heart) and "belābil" (nightingales); what drives away care is the nightingales, whose name sounds like care itself.

The last two couplets are built on comparisons. The garden is likened in its pleasantness to the gardens of paradise, the nightingales in their light and delicate voices to the morning breeze, the trees to the palaces of paradise, and the flowers to the lamps that light those palaces. Hüsameddin's translation adds a reason to each of these comparisons: the city resembles paradise because it is free of distress and of the harshness peculiar to cities, the nightingales resemble the morning breeze in the grace of the air and the delicacy of their song, and the trees resemble the palaces of paradise in their order and height. Comparing the tree to a palace and the flower to a lamp makes the garden look like a lit palace.

Historical Context

Tâcîzâde Sa'dî Çelebi was born in Amasya, taught in the Sahn colleges in the reign of Bayezid II, and died in 922 (1516). Hüsameddin says that he wrote an Arabic literary work to describe the vineyards and flowers of Amasya and its pleasures and delights. The TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam also states that he is recorded as having written a work called Hayrü'l-ahlâm describing the beauties of the city of Amasya. The title of the work means "the best of dreams". No published text of the work could be found for this collection; the fragment is taken from Hüsameddin's quotation, its only known witness.

Hüsameddin gives the fragment among his quotations from earlier writers who described Amasya; just before it come two Arabic couplets he attributes to al-Mutanabbi, and after it his own Amasya murabba. That a scholar from Amasya, who used Arabic as the language of learning, praised his native city in that language also shows the standing the city held in that age as a city of learning and of princes. Most of Sa'dî Çelebi's surviving poems are Turkish couplets in the biographical anthologies (tezkire); according to the TDV, his Arabic poems are collected in a compilation known as the Sâdî Çelebi Mecmuası.

Bibliography

Online sources