Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: 11-syllable syllabic metre

Bize hicrân düşmüş kilk-i ezelden
Levḥ üzre ismimiz ḳaralanınca
Yâr serde sevdâyı câme-i ‘aşḳıň
Gösteririm pâre pârelenince

In English

1. Separation fell to our lot from the pen of eternity, when our name was blackened on the tablet (of fate). Beloved, there is passion in my head; I will show you how the garment of love has been torn to pieces.

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 second and fourth lines rhyme in "karalanınca / pârelenince"; the first and third lines, "ezelden / aşkıň", are free. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The first half of the quatrain expresses the idea of fate through the image of writing. "Kilk-i ezel", the pen of eternity, is the divine pen that writes the destiny of all things; "levh" is the tablet on which this writing is set down. When the lover's name was "karalanınca" on this tablet, written or struck through, separation fell to his lot. The verb "karalamak" carries both the sense of writing and of writing a black fortune. The second half is more obscure: the lover will show the passion in his head and how the "câme-i aşk", the garment of love, has been torn apart. Tearing one's garment is, in older poetry, the outward sign of the pain and madness of love. The syntax of the third line is not fully resolved by the reading in the article; our rendering is an interpretation.

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. The poem is on page 35 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