Original Ottoman Turkish Text
Metre: Mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün
Velī çār-ebrūvānuñ her biri bir semte Hind ili
Miṡāl-i iḫtilāf-ı çār-meẕheb baḥs-ı vāḥidde
In English
1. But each of the four-browed ones (youths with a fresh moustache) is a land of India stretching in a different direction, just like the disagreement of the four schools of law on a single question.
Literary and Historical Commentary
This matla reworks once more the find of the fifth couplet of Sâhib's ghazal 104. There the image of the "çâr-ebrû" (four-browed) youth had worn the lover's body as thin as the hair's breadth between the four schools of law. Here each of the four brows stretches in a different direction, and the poet likens this spreading to the four Sunni schools giving different rulings on a single question (bahs-ı vâhid). A notion of jurisprudence is used to describe the lines of a face.
The phrase "Hind ili" (land of India) points to the blackness of the brows and moustache; in divan poetry India is associated with darkness and swarthiness, and the beloved's mole is often called a "Hindu". Each brow is a dark land in its own direction. The conjunction "velî" (but) at the head of the line suggests the couplet may have been detached from a longer poem; the matla begins, on its own, like a sentence continuing something said before. Since T. 738 is the couplet's only source, this possibility cannot be tested against another copy.
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. 227, matla 14 (Istanbul University Library T. 738, fol. 4a). https://openaccess.firat.edu.tr/handle/11508/16014
Online sources
