Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

Nâle ḳıl ey dil bugün ehl-i ṣafânıň zevki var
Ḥandeler eyler gülistânı sivânıň zevki var

In English

1. O heart, lament today; the people of pleasure (today) have their delight. Others have their delight; they make the rose garden laugh.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is recorded in the cönk as a "dîvân" or "dîvânî". In minstrel literature this name is given to poems composed in aruz, in couplets like the ghazal, and sung to the saz. Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the opening couplet of this poem. The refrain is "zevki var"; the rhyme is the "-ânıň" sound in "safânıň / sivânıň". The identification of the metre is ours; as is usual in the aruz poems of folk poets, some syllables may not fit the pattern exactly. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet sets the lover's loneliness against the joy of others. The "ehl-i safâ", the people of pleasure and merriment, are full of delight today; the lover's part is to lament. The word "sivâ" in the second line means "another, the others"; those who make the rose garden laugh, who make merry there, are others. "Hande", laughter, is also a name for the opening rose; the laughing of the rose garden expresses both the opening of the flowers and the festivity there. The sadness of the couplet comes from this contrast: while the world celebrates, the lover is left outside. The syntax of the second line is obscure, and our rendering is an interpretation.

Historical Context

The poem is recorded under the name of Tokatlı Nûrî in the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019; with thirty-six poems, Nûrî is the poet the cönk gives most space to. Drawing on Orhan Bilgin, Hakverdioğlu relates that Eyüb Sabrî of Merzifon often invited Nûrî to Merzifon; Nûrî's weight in the cönk can be explained by this friendship. Since other minstrels also used the pen name Nûrî, it is not certain that every Nûrî poem in the cönk belongs to Tokatlı Nûrî; the article attributes these poems to Tokatlı Nûrî. For the poet's life and his connection with Amasya, see the page on Tokatlı Nûrî. Eyüp Akman's entry on Tokatlı Nûrî in the Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü (Dictionary of Names in Turkish Literature), drawing on İbrahim Seçkin Aydın's thesis, reports that a poem with the refrain "zevki var" is recorded in the sources under the names of both Erzurumlu Emrah and Tokatlı Nûrî; the response poems (nazire) Nûrî wrote to the poems of his master Emrah have mixed up the two poets' work. The cönk records this poem under Nûrî's name; whether the text in the cönk is the same as the poem Aydın mentions cannot be settled without the full text. The poem is on page 29 of the cönk and page 549 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources