Original Ottoman Turkish Text

‘Īdde yüzüñ görüp elüñ öpen olur sa‘īd
Kim müyesser olur aña bir gün içinde se ‘īd

In English

1. Whoever sees your face on the feast day and kisses your hand becomes blessed; for in a single day three feasts fall to his lot. ("Sa‘īd" means happy, blessed; "se ‘īd" is a phrase built from Persian "se" (three) and Arabic "‘īd" (feast, bayram), meaning "three feasts". The three feasts are the feast day itself, seeing the beloved's face and kissing the beloved's hand.)

Literary and Historical Commentary

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet rests its entire weight on the final word. The first line ends with "sa‘īd" (happy, blessed); the second closes with "se ‘īd", written with almost the same letters and meaning "three feasts". In Arabic script the two expressions differ by a single letter, and they sound very close. A pun (cinas) thus arises at the line endings, and the rhyme itself is made by wordplay. In the edition "se ‘īd" is printed as two separate words, a spelling that shows the pun to the reader.

Kissing the hands of one's elders on the morning of a religious feast is a well-known custom of the holiday visit. The couplet carries this custom to the beloved's door: on the feast day, seeing his face counts as one feast and kissing his hand as another; with the feast itself, that makes three. The logic of the line rests on a play with numbers, and by keeping the number to the very end the couplet invites the reader to do a small sum. "Face", "hand" and "kissing" belong to the same scene of holiday greeting and call one another up (tenasüp). The contrast between "one day" and "three feasts" gives the wit its edge.

Structure of the Poem

Since both lines end on the same sound, the couplet may have opened a ghazal that is no longer extant. Its metre remains uncertain. Neither the syllable counts nor the run of long and short syllables in the two lines settle together into a known aruz pattern, and the anthology says nothing about metre. Âşık Çelebi gives the couplet under the heading "Ve lehu" (And also his): before it stands a ghazal fragment about the smoke of the lover's sighs, after it two couplets on the beloved growing into a young man. Found in no other anthology, the couplet is also absent, according to a footnote in the edition, from the F manuscript of Âşık Çelebi's work.

Historical Context

There is no record of the feast or the person the couplet was addressed to. According to Âşık Çelebi, Sürûrî left three divans; only one manuscript, from his younger years, is known today. Whether the feast couplet stands in that divan is impossible to say, as the text of the divan is not at hand. The pieces Âşık Çelebi picked from his teacher's verse for his entry are mostly single-couplet witticisms like this one, and it is thanks to that small selection that the couplet survives.

Bibliography

Online sources