Bayati

Urmia City

[Image source: https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/latest-news-in-brief/latest-news-in-brief-july-4-2020/ .]


Gence is further than here,
Its lawns padded with flowers.
    Love’s death is an act of god,
Parting from love is torture.


Burdan uzaq Gəncədir,
Güllər pəncə-pəncədir.
    Ölüm tanrı işidir,
Ayrılıq içkəncədir.




The moon rose but sank in pools,
Your face looks like just a moon.
    My youth days sank one by one,
Without you, my sky has no moon!


Ay doğdu düşdü çaya,
Camalın bənzər aya.
    Cavan ömrüm cürüdü,
Günləri saya-saya.





Gence : Second largest city in the Republic of Azerbaijan (North Azerbaijan).

These are two of the ten bayatis that I published a few days ago on Intercapillary Space:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2020/08/ten-bayatis.html

The English translations are by my friend Yashar Toghay. Yashar is also a hydrological engineer. (One of his long-standing concerns has been the ecological problems of Lake Urmia, in the heart of the Azerbaijani homeland.)

The bayati is a popular short poetic form in Azerbaijani literature, resembling tanka or sijo or the limerick in that it has a social role and is often composed by ordinary people with no pretension to being poets. 

The four lines are structurally two couplets and the rhyme scheme is aaba, both features that resemble the rubāʿī form of classical Persian poetry (used e.g. by Rūmī and in the poems traditionally attributed to Omar Khayyam).  Other analogies might be the Turkish murabba' and the Turkic tuyugh, both quatrain forms.