Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilātün fā‘ilün

‘Āşıḳ oldur kim rıżā-yı yār aña maḳṣūd ola
Her ne kim ma‘şūḳ iderse luṭfdan ma‘dūd ola
Odlara yaḳsañ beni kūyuñda ṣanma k’incinem
İstemezven līk işigüñde senüñ kim dūd ola
Şol ḳadardur dilde tīrüñ kim aransa topraġum
Ḥaşre dek andan çıḳan peykān-ı ḫūn-ālūd ola
Ḳanda ḳonsañ ḫargehüñ dūd-ı dil-i ‘uşşāḳdan
Çarḫ-ı nīlī gibi ey meh lāciverd-endūd ola
Yārı ḫoşnūd itmege sa‘y it ki Ḥaḳ ḫoşnūd olur
Ca‘ferā bir bendeden kim ṣāḥibi ḫoşnūd ola

In English

1. The lover is the one whose only aim is the beloved's consent; whatever the beloved does, he counts it a kindness.

2. Do not think I would be hurt if you burned me in fires in your quarter; I wish only one thing: that no smoke (rising from me) should be at your threshold. (The lover fears not burning but that his smoke might soil the beloved's door.)

3. Your arrows are so many in my heart that if my earth (my grave) were dug up, blood-stained arrowheads would come out of it until the Day of Resurrection.

4. O moon-faced one, wherever your tent is pitched, it is dyed deep blue, like the azure dome of the sky, by the smoke rising from the lovers' hearts.

5. Ca'fer, strive to please the beloved; for God, too, is pleased with a servant whose master is pleased with him.

Literary and Historical Commentary

A Ghazal That Opens with a Definition

The ghazal section of the divan begins with a definition: "Âşık oldur kim…", "the lover is the one who…". The first couplet states who the lover is in the form of a judgment and turns the whole ghazal into an explanation of that judgment. To count every act of the beloved a kindness and to accept every pain coming from that side is the attitude known in divan poetry as consent and surrender (rıza, teslimiyet). Câfer Çelebi pushes it to its extreme in the second couplet: even if the beloved threw him into the fire in her quarter he would not complain; his only worry is that the smoke rising as he burns might soil her threshold. His own suffering does not concern him; what frightens him is the chance that the beloved might be disturbed.

Every couplet rhymes on "-ūd" and closes on the refrain (redif) "ola": maḳṣūd, ma‘dūd, dūd, ḫūn-ālūd, lāciverd-endūd, ḫoşnūd. One of these rhyme words, "dūd", smoke, rises from the lover's burning in the second couplet and from the hearts of all lovers in the fourth, building a chain of images inside the poem. By the fourth couplet the smoke has grown so thick that it dyes the beloved's tent deep blue like the sky. The likeness between a tent (ḫargeh) and the dome of heaven is common in divan poetry; here what colours the dome is not the stars but the smoke of the lovers' sighs. The third couplet carries the exaggeration beyond death: if the lover's grave were opened, the beloved's bloody arrowheads would keep coming out of it until the Last Day.

Servant, Master and God

The last couplet ties the ghazal to a religious measure. The word "ḫoşnūd" (pleased) occurs three times in a single couplet, and a ladder is built from the relation between a servant (bende) and his master (ṣāḥib) up to the pleasure of God. Pleasing the beloved is likened to the consent a servant earns in God's sight by pleasing his master. In the "Ser-i Sühan" section of his Heves-nâme Câfer Çelebi has couplets that treat profane love as a bridge on the road to God; the last couplet of this ghazal reads like a short statement of the same idea. Even so, it does not slip into the tone of a sermon and remains a piece of self-counsel the lover gives himself in the form of advice.

The word "İstemezven" in the second couplet is formed with the old Anatolian Turkish first person singular suffix "-vEn" and means "I do not wish". The manuscripts part company in two places. Erünsal's thesis records "derdüñ" (your pain) for "tīrüñ" (your arrow) in the Hâlet Efendi copy of the third couplet, while in the Paris copy the address "ey meh" (O moon) of the fourth has become "ebr-i" (cloud), drawing sky and cloud closer together. Copied into five manuscripts, the ghazal was left out of Edirneli Nazmî's anthology of response poems.

Bibliography

Online sources