Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilātün fe‘ilün
Eyleme ḫaṭṭuñı ey müdde‘ī-i nāz-tirāş
Ḥüccet-i ḥüsnüñe tā kim dimesünler maḥkūk
In English
1. O claimant who shaves off pride, do not scrape away your down (your writing), lest they call the certificate (hüccet) of your beauty "scraped and erased".
Literary and Historical Commentary
This single-couplet matla is a jest built from the language of documents in the judge's court. A "hüccet" is the official certificate a judge issued at the end of a case; "mahkûk" is said of a document whose writing has been erased by scraping. Since a scraped document raised the suspicion of forgery, it could be judged invalid. The poet likens the beloved's beauty to a hüccet, and the down on his face to the writing (hat) of the document. If the beauty shaves his down, that is, scrapes away the writing, the certificate of his beauty will be counted "mahkûk" and lose its worth.
"Müddeî" also comes from the language of the court and means plaintiff, claimant; here it addresses the beloved who lays claim to beauty and gives himself airs. That these terms should meet in the pen of a poet who served as judge and army judge and finally became şeyhülislam needs no explanation. The matla also reverses the usual judgement that counts the down as the end of beauty: here the down is beauty's certificate, and erasing it is a forgery. The Ali Emîrî and T. 1710/6 copies do not contain the couplet; the jest of the forged document can be read only in T. 738.
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. 223, matla 1 (Istanbul University Library T. 738, fol. 3a). https://openaccess.firat.edu.tr/handle/11508/16014
Online sources
