Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilün

Baḫt-ı yār olur ise bezmine yārüñ varılur
Ruḫṣat olursa niyāza o şehe yalvarılur
Ḳoma ruḫsārda mūy-ı ḫaṭṭ-ı nā-ber-cāyı
Gülşenüñ sebze-i bī-gāneleri ḳoparılur
Duḫān-ı sūzuñ imāme-dehenüñ öpdükce
İdemez hażm çubuḳ derd-i ḥasedle yarılur
Bend olup kākül-i üftādesine ḫaste-göñül
O bahāneyle gehī gerden-i yāre ṣarılur
Pāy-ı yāre düşüp itsem n'ola Ṣāḥib girye
Resmdür tāze nihālān-ı çemen ṣuvarılur

In English

1. If fortune helps, one reaches the beloved's gathering; if leave is given, one entreats and pleads with that king.

2. Do not leave on the cheek the hair of the out-of-place down; the strange weeds of the rose garden are plucked.

3. As the smoke of tobacco kisses your mouthpiece-like mouth, the pipe cannot digest it and splits with the pain of envy.

4. The sick heart, bound to the curl that has felled it, by that pretext sometimes wraps itself around the beloved's neck.

5. Sâhib, what if I fall at the beloved's foot and weep? It is the custom that the young saplings of the meadow are watered.

Literary and Historical Commentary

The third couplet carries the custom of tobacco smoking into love poetry. The "imâme" is the mouthpiece of the tobacco pipe taken between the lips, often made of amber or bone; the "çubuk" is the long stem through which tobacco is smoked. The beloved's mouth is likened to a mouthpiece; as the tobacco smoke kisses this mouth, the pipe stem splits from envy. An everyday event like the cracking of a pipe stem over time turns into the lover's jealousy. That tobacco, which met with prohibitions in the seventeenth century, should appear so freely in poetry at the start of the eighteenth bears a trace of the changing daily life of the age.

The second and fifth couplets are built in the language of gardening. The down on the cheek is likened to a weed growing in a rose garden and is asked to be plucked; this request relates to the view in divan poetry that the growth of down on the beloved's face is the end of beauty. In the final couplet the lover likens falling at the beloved's foot and weeping to the watering of young saplings: the cypress-tall beloved is a sapling, and the lover's tears are its water.

The fourth couplet is built on a pretext. The curl is the hair that falls toward the beloved's neck; since the heart is bound to this hair, it too ends up wrapped around the beloved's neck along with it.

Bibliography

  • Meral Topal, Pîrî-zâde Mehmed Sâhib Hayatı, Edebî Kişiliği, Eserleri ve Divanı'nın Tenkitli Metni, MA thesis, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Elazığ 2004, p. 138, ghazal 40 (Istanbul University Library T. 738, fol. 9b). https://openaccess.firat.edu.tr/handle/11508/16014

Online sources