Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün

Derd-i dilim açsam eger âh cânım efendim
Bir derdim olur biň ḳadar âh cânım efendim

In English

1. If I were to reveal the sorrow of my heart, ah my dear lord, my one sorrow would become a thousand, ah my dear lord.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a kalenderî. The kalenderî is one of the forms minstrels composed in aruz and is generally written in the pattern "mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün". 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 "âh cânım efendim"; the rhyme is "eger / kadar"; the rhyme is weak and is an example of the looseness seen in folk poets' aruz poems. 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 says that sorrow grows the more it is told. Among ordinary people one opens one's heart to ease the burden; here, on the contrary, the sorrow, once revealed, rises from one to a thousand. This small reversal shows that the lover's grief is too deep to pass by being told. The numerical contrast between "bir" (one) and "biň" (thousand) adds an open hyperbole to the couplet. The address "âh cânım efendim" in the refrain has the character of a burden repeated in every couplet when kalenderîs are sung with the saz; it addresses the beloved with both affection and respect.

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 "canım efendim" 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 6 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