Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: each segment in the pattern – – . – – (mef'ûlü fa'lün)

Ey cân-ı ‘âlem her sırra maḥrem ve’y ġonca gül-fem ġâyet güzelsin
Ey cân-ı ‘âlem bir ince belsin her sırra maḥremsin bî-bedelsin
Gâyet güzelsin sen bî-bedelsin bir ince belsin tûl-i emelsin

In English

1. O soul of the world, confidant of every secret, and O rosebud-mouthed one, you are most beautiful. O soul of the world, you are slender-waisted, the confidant of every secret, without equal. You are most beautiful, you are without equal, slender-waisted, (the object of) every long-held hope.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a satrancî. In this form the lines are divided into short segments, and the same segments return in shifting positions like pieces on a chessboard. Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know the opening section of this poem. The segments form internal rhymes on the sounds "âlem / mahrem / gül-fem" and "güzelsin / belsin / bî-bedelsin / emelsin". 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. In the article the lines are broken because of the page width; here each line has been joined into a single line. For this poem the article cites page 171 of Ahmet Talat's (Onay) 1933 book. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The satrancî is one of the forms of minstrel aruz poetry most open to wordplay. In this piece the lines are divided into short segments, and the same segments ("ey cân-ı âlem", "her sırra mahrem", "gâyet güzelsin", "bî-bedelsin", "bir ince belsin") return in shifting positions; the reader or listener follows the pieces as they change place like pieces on a chessboard (satranç). In meaning the piece is a eulogy of the beloved, epithet by epithet: soul of the world, confidant of secrets, rosebud-mouthed, slender-waisted, without equal. "Tûl-i emel", long-held hope, is in Sufism a negative term for attachment to the world; here the beloved is named as the object of all the lover's long hopes.

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. According to Akman's entry, Nûrî's poem beginning "Ey cân-ı âlem" is also among his poems collected in Kastamonu and set to music. For this poem Hakverdioğlu cites page 171 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 26 of the cönk and page 549 of the article.

Bibliography

Academic studies

Books

Online sources