Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün

Ey yâr beni sen âteş-i hicrâna bıraḳma
Yaḳdıň bu ḳadar bâri yeter cânımı yaḳma

In English

1. O beloved, do not leave me in the fire of separation; you have burned me this much, let that at least be enough, do not burn my soul (any further).

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 the negative suffix "-ma"; the rhyme is the "-ak" sound in "bırakma / yakma". 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. For this poem the article cites page 139 of Ahmet Talat's (Onay) 1933 book on Tokatlı Nûrî. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet shows well the fluent, conversational manner of the kalenderî. The lover asks two things of the beloved: not to leave him in the "âteş-i hicrân", the fire of separation, and not to burn his soul any longer. The repetition of the verb "to burn" in both lines puts the image of fire at the centre of the couplet. "Bâri yeter" (let that at least be enough) is taken from everyday speech and gives the voice of a lover who speaks as if bargaining with the beloved, now hoping for some fairness. In divan poetry the beloved's burning of the lover is regarded as a pleasure; here the lover says he has reached the limit of this fire.

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 "canımı yakma" 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. For this poem Hakverdioğlu cites page 139 of Ahmet Talat's (Onay) book on Tokatlı Nûrî, where the full text is found. In the article's bibliography the year of this book is given as 1993, while the text itself has 1933; Akman's entry also dates the book to 1933. The poem is on page 20 of the cönk and page 549 of the article.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

Online sources