Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Ḫazân ile geçdi gülşen-i bostân
Eyle derdli bülbül zâr ġarîb ġarîb
Ḫarâba yüz ṭutdı bezm-i gülistân
Aġla şimden girü var ġarîb ġarîb

In English

1. The rose garden of the orchard has passed with autumn; O sorrowful nightingale, lament forlornly. The gathering of the rose garden has fallen into ruin; from now on go and weep forlornly.

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 "bostân / gülistân", the second and fourth in "zâr / var"; "ġarîb ġarîb" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The quatrain carries the rose and nightingale conceit into autumn. The rose garden has passed with "hazân", autumn; in a garden without roses, all that is left to the nightingale is weeping. "Bezm-i gülistân", the gathering in the rose garden, evokes both a real spring festivity and the happy days spent with the beloved; that gathering has now "fallen into ruin". The lover addresses the nightingale, but the address also describes his own state: beauty has passed, and a forlorn weeping is what remains. The doubled word "garîb garîb" in the refrain is a strong repetition in folk poetry, expressing loneliness and abandonment.

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 "garib garib" 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 56 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