Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fā‘ilātün Fā‘ilātün Fā‘ilātün Fā‘ilün

Yāre baḳduḳça gözüm ca‘liyle aḥvel eylerem
Bir naẓarda tā iki görine cānānum baña

In English

1. Whenever I look at the beloved I deliberately make my eye squint, so that in a single glance my beloved may appear to me as two. ("Ca‘l" means feigned, deliberate; "ahvel" means squint-eyed. A squinting eye was thought to see everything double.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

This single couplet (beyit) is written in the metre "fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün" of the remel family of aruz (quantitative metre). The metre is not stated in the biographical anthology; it has been deduced from the scansion of the couplet. Since its lines do not rhyme with each other, it must be an inner couplet of a ghazal; "baña" is the redif (refrain word) and "cānānum" the rhyme word. The couplet appears only in Âşık Çelebi's biographical anthology (tezkire), among the examples given from Sürûrî's poems, and according to the manuscript variant recorded by Filiz Kılıç it is missing in the F manuscript of the anthology. The rest of the ghazal, and to whom and when it was written, are not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet expresses, through a playful conceit, the lover's inability to have enough of the beloved. The lover cannot be content with seeing the beloved once; he wants to see him twice over. For this he deliberately makes his eye squint, since a squinting eye sees a thing as two. So in one glance he sees two beloveds. The wit of the couplet lies in the turning of a defect of the eye into a gain in the lover's hands: the squint that others would avoid becomes for him the means of multiplying the beloved.

The antithesis (tezat) between "one" and "two" ties the two lines of the couplet together. There is also a clear congruence of images (tenasüp) among the words "looking", "eye", "squint" and "nazar" (glance). The use of the word "ca‘l" matters: the lover is not squint-eyed but makes himself squint on purpose, which lends the couplet an air of play. Divan poetry has many conceits about the eye and the glance, but a lover who resorts to squinting in order to see the beloved double is not a familiar image. Âşık Çelebi's choice of this couplet suggests that he liked such unexpected conceits in his teacher's poetry.

Historical Context

Âşık Çelebi was Sürûrî's pupil and knew his teacher closely. In his biographical anthology he writes that Sürûrî composed ghazals, solved riddles (muamma) and corrected the poems of poets; he also chooses a few couplets from his poems. Gelibolulu Mustafa Âlî, on the other hand, says that he could not find a sound ghazal in Sürûrî's poetry. This contrast shows that Sürûrî's poetry was remembered less as a whole than for the wit of individual couplets. This couplet is one such piece of wit.

Bibliography

Online sources