Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mefā‘īlün Mefā‘īlün Fe‘ūlün

Ḳucarken düşde dildārı n’olaydı
Uyana kişi ḳoynında bulaydı

In English

1. How would it be if, while embracing the beloved in a dream, one were to wake and find him in one's arms?

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

This is a matla (opening couplet), a single couplet (beyit) whose two lines rhyme with each other, written in the metre "mefā‘īlün mefā‘īlün fe‘ūlün" of the hezec family of aruz (quantitative metre). The metre is not stated in the biographical anthology; it has been deduced from the scansion of the couplet. The rhyme is built on the sound "-laydı" in "n’olaydı" and "bulaydı"; the ending "-aydı" gives both lines a sense of wishing and regret. The couplet appears only in Âşık Çelebi's biographical anthology (tezkire), among the examples given from Sürûrî's poems. According to the manuscript variant recorded by Filiz Kılıç, several of the examples Âşık Çelebi gives, beginning with this couplet, are missing in the F manuscript of the anthology. Whether the couplet is the matla of a ghazal or a couplet composed on its own is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet rests on a situation much treated in divan poetry: being able to meet the beloved only in a dream. The lover in separation cannot see the beloved in waking life, but embraces him in his dream. Waking ends this union. Sürûrî turns this familiar scene into a sentence of wishing: how would it be if the beloved embraced in the dream were also found in one's arms on waking? There is a clear antithesis (tezat) between dream and waking, and a congruence of images (tenasüp) between "embracing" and "arms".

The strength of the couplet lies in its simplicity. There are hardly any Arabic or Persian compounds in its lines; the language is a Turkish close to everyday speech. "N’olaydı" carries both a question, "how would it be", and a regret, "if only it were so". The impersonal phrasing of the second line ("uyana kişi", one were to wake) makes the wish that of every lover in the same state. The couplet therefore reads less like a ghazal couplet addressed to the beloved than like a maxim voicing a feeling everyone knows.

Historical Context

To whom and when the couplet was written is not known. In the Bahrü'l-maârif Sürûrî writes that in his youth he composed some five hundred ghazals out of love and longing and gathered them in a divan so that they would not be lost; Âşık Çelebi too records that his teacher had three Turkish divans. That such a plain couplet of wishing is among the few couplets Âşık Çelebi chose from these divans suggests that he liked this bare manner of speech in his teacher's poetry.

Bibliography

  • Âşık Çelebi, Meşâ'irü'ş-şu'arâ, ed. Filiz Kılıç, Ankara: Ministry of Culture and Tourism Publications, 2018 (e-book), pp. 419-420 (manuscript variant n. 4542), https://ekitap.ktb.gov.tr/Eklenti/59036,asik-celebi-mesairus-suarapdf.pdf.
  • İsmail Güleç, "Gelibolulu Musluhiddin Sürûrî, Hayatı, Kişiliği, Eserleri ve Bahrü'l-Ma'ârif İsimli Eseri", Osmanlı Araştırmaları 21 (2001), pp. 211-236.

Online sources