Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâʿilâtün fâʿilâtün fâʿilün (metre identified by us)

Gözlerim bakdıkça sîm-endâmına
Parlayub Sîmî demişdir nâmına

In English

1. As my eyes gazed upon that silver body, they lit up and gave it the name Sîmî, that is, “of silver”.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Silver and the Gümüşlüzâde Family

The whole wit of the couplet rests on a play on a name. The Persian "sîm" means silver; "sîm-endâm", silver-bodied, is a common epithet in divan poetry for a beauty whose skin is white and shining. The pen name Sîmî comes from the same word and means "of silver". That the poet's family name was Gümüşlüzâde, "son of the silver family", gives the play another layer: a çelebi of the Gümüşlüzâdes, descendants of Pîr İlyâs, seems to have taken the Persian equivalent of his family name as his pen name. Hüsameddin does not draw this connection explicitly; the link between pen name and family name is a reading suggested by the text.

Whose Couplet

After quoting the couplet Hüsameddin gives two possibilities: it was "gâlibâ", most probably, said about Sîmî, or it is Sîmî's own. In the first case another poet, praising a silver-skinned youth, is explaining his pen name. In the second the poet built a couplet explaining where his own pen name came from, a gesture found in pen-name couplets. The third-person verb "demişdir" fits both readings, since the subject is "my eyes". No source for the couplet is named. Since Hüsameddin says that Sîmî appeared in the burnt anthology of Abdî Efendi, the couplet may have come from it; no record confirms this.

The metre is the short remel common in mesnevis and short occasional pieces. Because only one couplet survives, it cannot be told whether it belonged to a longer poem or was an independent jest written in the margin of an anthology. Sîmî's career, from court clerk to secretary of the sanjak council, is told in Sîmî Ahmed Çelebi (Gümüşlüzâde).

Bibliography

Online sources