Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilâtün fâilün

Seyre çıḳ ey dil temâşâ it ne cândır çifteler
Dehride hem-tâsı yoḳ nâzik-miyândır çifteler

In English

1. O heart, go out and look, behold; what dear souls are these pairs. In the world they have no equal, slender-waisted are these pairs.

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 "çifteler"; the rhyme is the "-ândır" sound in "cândır / miyândır". 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

It is not clear what the word "çifteler" (pairs) in the refrain of the couplet describes. The word may suggest a pair of beauties, two beloveds walking side by side; since the epithet "nâzik-miyân", slender-waisted, is used of people, this reading is strong. On the other hand, there are places in Anatolia named "Çifteler", and it is conceivable that the poem names a pleasure spot; we have no information supporting this. The mood of the couplet is an invitation to an outing: the lover tells his heart to go out and see these beauties. The expression "ne cândır" means in everyday speech "how lovely, how charming".

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. The poem is on page 56 of the cönk and page 550 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources