Muntakhab al-tawarikh 357: CXLVI. NAVIDI, OF TURBAT.

357

He composed a dīwān, and also a tarjī‘-band satirizing Kūcak Beg, the accountant of Bairām Khān, the letters of which a hundred storms like that which occurred in the days of Noah would not wash from the pages of this age. The following few couplets are by him:—
“O thou, in whose glorious days time glories, Khān, son of a Khān, chief, and high officer of kings, Bairām! up the merriment of the entertainment, I have blindly and exactly copied the passage from the original; and I hope that the clear-sighted men of this time will regard what they have seen as unseen and what I have done as though it had never been done, and will wink at my fault and my shame, and pass by it and pardon me, for 'Satire in speech is as salt in food' is a proposition accepted by all learned and well-informed men, and although some people, falsifying the text, read, instead of 'Satire,' 'Syntax in speech,' the Maqamat of Hariri clearly show that the first, and not the second, is the correct reading.
The following few verses are from Nuvidi's divan, but I am not certain whether they are by this Nuvidi, or by another poet with the same poetical name:—
“I still have thy arrow, which I have had in my heart for an age, I still have the plant of desire for thee which I received from thee; I still have the fetter which at the very first I, poor and distraught, Received from that Laila-like beauty with the musky tresses. Though my eyes have become dim from weeping, I retain the picture of thee In that same form which has ever been reflected in the mirror of my heart. Take my hand, love, for an age. My foot has been held in the valley of love’s madness in the mire caused by my tears, as it was always held. I, Nuvidi, still have that heart like a bird struck by the arrow of her glance Oh on thy leprous body, thus pray to God, Both morning and evening, all the inhabitants of the heavens, May there fall fever, colic, haemorrhoids, consumption, and dropsy, Measles, intestinal worms, epilepsy, and delirium. Then when thou haltest weak and feeble, seeking a cure, May all the physicians prescribe for thee the following diet, Simiae vomitum, decem dierum canis stercora, Ursi penem, felis caudam, et stercora sicca quibus calefiunt hypocausta. Happy will that day be when thou art griped by colic, for which The great physicians will prescribe an enema, And the forefoot of an ass, the foot of a camel, the horn of a goat, The scalp of a bear, the head of a mule, and the teeth of a hog.’”
He could also be abusively satirical in prose as the following story will show. One day when weary he was seated on an old felt cushion and said to me before the court, ‘Dog, dost thou eat filth before me?’ I said, ‘Surely it is lawful for any dog to eat filth before you.’ However, as Navidi had but one eye I have closed my eyes to his baseness, and if I have recounted his faults it was only because the road was opened to me by the author of the original Tazkirah, Mir ‘Ala’u-d-daulah, and although the recording of obscene language and the reckoning up of faults is not the custom of the author of this Selection, yet in this instance, with the object of indulging the love of a jest and keeping