Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

‘Aceb ben ne didim o şîve-kâre
Yine bugün yüz göz egri ḳaş egri
Yıḳmış fesi çekmiş re’s-i küffârı
Servi nâzım kesmiş zülfi baş egri

In English

1. What, I wonder, did I say to that coquettish beauty, that today again her face and eyes are askew, her brow askew? She has tilted her fez and drawn back her dark locks (the "infidel" tresses); my proud cypress has cut her locks, her head held askew.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a koşma. The koşma is the most common verse form of minstrel poetry; it is built of quatrains and usually sung in an eleven-syllable metre. The lines have a caesura after 6+5 or 4+4+3 syllables; the syllable count is ours. Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the first quatrain of this poem. The first and third lines rhyme in "şîve-kâre / küffârı", the second and fourth in "ḳaş / baş"; "egri" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain portrays the manner of a sulking beloved like a lively scene, through the word "eğri" (askew). The lover cannot tell what he said; the beloved's face and eyes, her brow, are "eğri", that is, sullen and offended. In the second half the beloved's appearance is given in detail: she has "tilted" her fez to one side, drawn back her locks and bent her head. The reading and meaning of "re's-i küffâr" are uncertain; since dark hair is called "infidel" (kâfir) in divan poetry, it may refer to dark locks. The fez places the poem in the dress of the nineteenth century and shows minstrel poetry taking details from the daily life of its own age. The refrain "eğri" describes both the sulkiness and the tilted fez and head together.

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 "baş eğri" 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 39 of the cönk and page 548 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources