Serbesî is a poet whose name we know only from a manuscript verse notebook compiled in Merzifon, the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019. The cönk contains a single poem attributed to him, a divânî written in aruz. His real name, where he lived and his century are unknown. Hakverdioğlu mentions him together with Fethî, who was probably from Merzifon, among the "local poets whose names have never been heard"; this description is less a finding than an acknowledgement that no trace of the poet has been found in any other source. This page sets out separately what is known and what is not known about Serbesî, and publishes the poem preserved in the cönk on a page of its own.

Life

Nothing is known about Serbesî's life. No poet with this pen name has been found in the biographical volumes of Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi, or in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature). "Serbesî" is not a common pen name either; it must have been formed by adding the suffix of relation to the Arabic-derived word "serbes" (free, unrestrained, unattached). The meaning of the pen name may suggest that the poet saw himself as a dervish or a kalender free from worldly cares; but this is only the connotation of the name, not information about the poet's character.

The only clue to the poet's period is the cönk itself. Judging from the general condition of the notebook and the choice of poets in it, Hakverdioğlu estimates that the cönk is about a hundred years old. Since the cönk also contains ghazals by Bâkî, a sixteenth-century poet, this date does not show that every poem in it was written in that period. Still, the weight of the cönk lies with the minstrels of the nineteenth century: the poet with the most poems is Tokatlı Nûrî, and names such as Erzurumlu Emrah, Dertli and Âşık Ömer are also there. It is likely that Serbesî was one of the poets who composed verse around Merzifon in that century; this is an inference.

The Merzifon Cönkü and the Connection with Amasya

The Merzifon Cönkü is a notebook of the oblong shape popularly called "calf's tongue" or "ox tongue", measuring 10.5 by 25 centimetres. It is written in ta'lik script in black ink; it has 112 pages, and its first page and a few leaves at the end are missing. Its compiler and the date of copying are not recorded. Hakverdioğlu bought the notebook from a second-hand bookseller, and according to the bookseller the work came from Merzifon. The cönk contains 161 poems by thirty-two poets; 98 are in aruz and 63 in syllabic metre. Hakverdioğlu thinks the compiler may have been Fethî, who mentions a Merzifon beauty named "Gülfadik" in two of his poems; the fact that the cönk devotes a separate section to the poems of Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon strengthens the view that the collection was made within Sabrî's literary circle.

Within this framework, Serbesî's connection with Amasya is indirect. The inclusion of his poem in a cönk kept in Merzifon shows that his verse was known and recited in the poetry gatherings of Merzifon. There is no direct record that the poet himself was from Merzifon; Hakverdioğlu's description of him as a "local poet" points in that direction but rests on no document.

The State of the Sources

All the information about Serbesî comes from two places in Hakverdioğlu's article. The first is the phrase "Serbesî 1 aruz" in the section of the article that lists the poets in the cönk and the number of their poems. The second is the sentence saying that the cönk contains "many poets, from famous ones such as Tokatlı Nûrî to local poets whose names have never been heard, such as Fethî and Serbesî". In the poems section of the article the first two couplets of Serbesî's divânî are given, and it is noted that the poem is on page 48 of the cönk. At the end of his article Hakverdioğlu writes that treating the poets of the cönk one by one and identifying those on whom no study exists has been left to a separate work. Serbesî's identity is therefore an open question today; and since the reading itself depends on the spelling in the manuscript, the possibility that the pen name should be read differently cannot be entirely ruled out.

Poetry

The only poem recorded under Serbesî's name in the cönk is a divânî. The divânî is a form that minstrels composed in aruz, usually in the pattern "fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün"; it is one of the areas in which saz poets came close to divan poetry. The first two couplets of the poem given in the article link the cry of the lover burning with the pain of separation, "come to my rescue", to the story of Jacob and Joseph: the lover weeps like Jacob and has fallen into the dungeon like Joseph. The rest of the poem exists only in the cönk itself and has not been published. The surviving couplets are given with the original text, an English rendering and a commentary on the separate page "Divânî 1: Ey perî bülbül gibi efkâre düşdüm gel yetiş" in this category.

Bibliography

Online sources