Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Baňa ḳan yutturur ṣaḥbâ-yı hicrân
Bilmem bu ḥasretlik gider mi böyle
Ben mi tedbîrimde eyledim noḳṣan
Yoḳsa tecelli-i ḳader mi böyle

In English

1. The wine of separation makes me swallow blood; I do not know whether this longing will go on like this. Did I fall short in my own planning, or is this how fate has chosen to reveal itself?

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 "hicrân / noksan", the second and fourth in "gider mi / kader mi"; "böyle" is the refrain. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first line of the quatrain likens separation to a wine: "sahbâ-yı hicrân" is the wine of parting, and what it makes the lover drink is blood. Swallowing blood is a Turkish idiom for bearing great pain in silence; the comparison combines the idiom with the image of wine. The second half is a questioning: the lover asks whether what has befallen him is his own fault or "tecellî-i kader", the manifestation of fate. This question voices, in the plain language of a folk poet, the tension between human will and destiny, and it is left unanswered. The line beginning "bilmem" (I do not know) and the refrain in the form of a question give the quatrain a tone of bewilderment and helplessness.

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 "kader mi böyle" 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. According to Akman's entry, Nûrî's koşma beginning with the lines "Bana kan yutturdu sahba-yı hicran / Bilmem bu ayrılık gider mi böyle" was collected in Kastamonu and set to music by Muzaffer Sarısözen and Nida Tüfekçi and entered the archive of Istanbul Radio; the readings "yutturur" and "hasretlik" in the cönk differ slightly from the form in that collection. The poem is on page 9 of the cönk and page 547 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources