Gülü Seven Dikenine Katlanır

Literal Translation

Whoever loves the rose puts up with its thorns.

Meaning and Usage

Gülü seven dikenine katlanır is a proverb about the troubles that come attached to something we value.

Turkish dictionaries define it plainly: a person endures the difficulties that come from someone they love, or from work they love.

So it reaches well past romance. People say it about a demanding job, or about a friend whose temper everyone already knows.

It is often said to someone who is complaining about a thing they would never actually give up.

The Nightingale's Consolation

In classical Ottoman poetry the rose is the beloved and the nightingale, bülbül, is the lover. The rose seldom answers him.

The thorn has its own part in that world. It is the rakip, the rival who stays close to the beloved and causes the lover pain.

Cemal Kurnaz describes this in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi: since no rose in this world grows without a thorn, the nightingale, wounded by it, consoles himself with Gülü seven dikenine katlanır. The proverb lives inside a much wider literary image, where loving the rose means facing its thorn.

The exact age of the proverb in its present wording is uncertain. The rose and the nightingale have a long-established place in classical Turkish literature, and the thorn comes with them.

The rose also has a physical home in Türkiye. Isparta's damask rose, grown for its oil, is a thorny shrub picked by hand during a short harvest.

Reading the Suffixes

The proverb has four words, and most of its grammar sits in the suffixes.

Seven is sev-, love, with -en, a participle that turns the verb into a person: the one who loves. English needs "whoever" or "the one who." Turkish needs only the suffix.

Gülü is the object of that love. The -ü is the accusative, marking the rose as a definite object. The same letters appear in Isparta Gülü, where they work as the compound marker of a noun compound. The structure around the word decides which reading is right.

Dikenine is built in layers: diken, thorn, then the possessive -i, its thorn, then a linking -n-, then the dative -e. That n appears whenever a third-person possessive suffix is followed by a case ending, as in evine, to his house.

The dative is there because of the verb. Katlanmak, to put up with, takes what you endure in the dative: Bu gürültüye katlanamıyorum, I can't stand this noise.

Katlanır is the aorist of katlanmak. The aorist states what is generally true, which is why so many Turkish proverbs end in it.

Turkish also keeps the thorn singular, dikenine, its thorn, where English prefers the plural. The Turkish singular is generic and covers every thorn the rose has.

Example Usage

Turkish

Bu işi gerçekten seviyorsan, işin yoğun günlerine de alışman gerekecek. Gülü seven dikenine katlanır. 

English

If you really love this work, you will have to get used to its busy days too. Whoever loves the rose puts up with its thorns.

Cultural Note

Turkish has a close relative of this proverb: Dikensiz gül olmaz, there is no rose without thorns.

The two expressions look at the same image from different sides. Dikensiz gül olmaz describes the rose itself: good things can come with difficulties. Gülü seven dikenine katlanır focuses on the person who chooses the rose and accepts the difficulty that comes with it.

Interested in more Turkish idioms and expressions? Explore the full collection on Learn Turkish with Seda.