Original Ottoman Turkish Text

Metre: Mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün

Ṭâḳat mı ḳılur bende-i üftâde efendim
‘Âşıḳ olalı ben sana dünyâda efendim

In English

1. My lord, can a fallen servant bear (this)? My lord, ever since I fell in love with you in this world (I have had no strength left to bear it).

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The poem is a kalenderî. The kalenderî is one of the forms minstrels composed in aruz and is generally written in the pattern "mef'ûlü mefâîlü mefâîlü feûlün". Because Hakverdioğlu's article publishes only the first verse unit of each poem in the cönk, we know only the opening couplet of this poem. The refrain is "efendim"; the rhyme is the "-âde / -âda" sound in "üftâde / dünyâda". 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. To whom and on what occasion the poem was composed is not known.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The couplet expresses the lover's failing strength through a question. "Bende-i üftâde", the fallen servant, shows the lover seeing himself as a slave fallen to the ground before the beloved. "Tâkat kılmak" means to endure, to bear; the question implies that the lover can bear it no longer. The second line gives the beginning of this state: the lover has been so ever since the day he fell in love with the beloved. The end of the line seems left open, and its meaning is completed only by the rest of the poem; the part given in brackets in our rendering is therefore an interpretation. "Efendim" (my lord) in the refrain is a respectful and affectionate address often found in kalenderîs.

Historical Context

The poem is recorded under the pen name Yesârî in the Merzifon Cönkü introduced by Metin Hakverdioğlu in 2019; the cönk contains four of Yesârî's poems, one in syllabic metre and three in aruz. The article does not introduce the poet. Yesârî of Çankırı is named among the poets with whom Tokatlı Nûrî held poetic gatherings in Çankırı, and the cönk includes, alongside Nûrî, names from the same circle such as Zahmî and Bezmî; it is therefore likely that the poem belongs to the minstrel Yesârî of Çankırı, but this is our inference. For details, see the page on Yesârî. The poem is on page 86 of the cönk and page 552 of the article; its full text is in the cönk itself and has not been published to date.

Bibliography

Online sources