Persian Language and Literature

Publication Information

Hafez and Norm-breaking in Form and Content of the Ghazal

Taghi Pournamdarian

Norm-breaking in the field of literature, like other areas of human knowledge, is the province of the talented. Norm-breakings Hafiz undertook in his ghazals came to be the source of a movement with a good many imitators. His norm-breakings took place in form, meaning and/or in the possible relationships between the two. Critiquing the social mores was one of his trademark iconoclastic practices in the realm of content. Another norm-breaking was inventing rhetorical subtleties whose novelty was particularly conspicuous in the realm of pun. It was an innovation in creating varied links of signs on the horizontal axis of poetry—an innovation resulted from Hafez’s contemplations on the emotional meanings of words conjured up in various cultural aspects. The harmony of meaning background and emotional background with the general music dominating them—a linkage created by meter, rhyme and juxtaposition of words—is another feature in Hafez’s poetry. The impressing value and emotional intimacy of these elements are palpable in his poetry. The most remarkable norm-breaking in Hafez’s ghazals may be the way in which the scattered meanings clandestinely interact through a ghazal; this has caused most scholars to regard it as polysemous and lacking in terms of logical relationship among couplets. These couplets, albeit distantly related with each other, are connected deep inside. Besides demonstrating Hafez’s rhetorical, artistic as well as semantic norms-breakings, the present paper shows that in spite of his poetry seeming scattered, which is a result of distant and far-reached associations in Hafez’s culturally and experientially loaded mind, there is an inner relationship among them that can be understood by transforming the norm-breaking propositions to norm-enforcing ones. A ghazal by Saadi is juxtaposed to one by Hafez to illustrate the issue at hand.

Modern Techniques of Intellectual Reaction in ShazdeEhtejab

Fatemeh Jafari Kamangar

The authors of modern stories for the deliverance from the deformity of the new civilization attend the inner world, which is more expanded than the external world. They disregard specific philosophies in art and life and try to display the subjective and psychological personalities. Moreover, instead of revealing social objective challenges of the characters, they aim at displaying the contents of the mind’s inner world. However, to describe the inner world and the mind with the same writing methods used formerly is not possible. Modern writers in order to show the twisted layers of the mind and its world have tried to introduce new ways of narration and story writing. Of course, using such methods may cause some complexity in the novel, but the writer does that deliberately to bring the structure of his novel close to the structure of the mind.This article is a library research highlighting the nature of the mind and presenting one of the first Persian modern subjective novelsShazdeEhtejab by HushangGolshiri. It attempts to discuss how this novel shows the hidden world of the characters and investigates in depth the basic techniques that reveal the mind and the innerworld of the characters.

Comparative Study of the Meaning of Symbols in Classical Literature and Ahmad Shamlu’s Poetry

Qolam Reza Salemian

Using indirect explanation and symbolism has a long history in Persian literature. Classic poets have used many symbols to explain mystical concepts. In contemporary periods, however, the insight of the poets is deeper than that of traditional poets as they pay more attention to political and social issues. Accordingly, the symbols have changed so that in contemporary poetry they are used for expressing political and social thoughts. Political and social symbolism is a new phenomenon in Persian poetry that begins with Nima and is developed by his followers, especially Ahmad Shamlu. Shamlu was not interested in explicit words, so in order to disseminate the clusters of meaning in his poems he used symbols and symbolism. In his deep and significant symbolism Shamluhas attempted to change the repeated and old symbols of classic poetry and to give them new meaning. This comparative study attempts to look at the different meanings of symbols in Shamlu’s poetry and to explain how the poet has used them.

Aesthetic Analysis of the Phonetic Structure of QaysarAminpour’s poetry

Masoud Rouhani

Poetry is an event that happens in language. In fact, the poet in his poetry works with language and the reader understands the difference between his poetic language and the common language. The Purpose of the poem is to create harmony among its different elements and one way to establish this harmony is through the phonetic structure of poetry. The Formalists and structuralists believe that the basis of poetry is its structure and in their structural studies they give more importance to the phonetic structure.In this article attempt is made to investigate the phonetic structure and the classification of all methods of forming this structure in the poetry of QaysarAminpour as well as the literary devices that shape the phonetic structure. Aminpour is one of the contemporary poets that adopts a classical form and is one of the followers of Nima. He uses the multiple language possibilities to add to the music of his poetry. The phonetic construction in Aminpour’s poetry has three levels: phonetic balance, lexical balance and syntactic balance. He looks at the special features of different components forming the word—phoneme to sentence—and creates artistic beauty in his poetry. He applies various techniques, such as repetition, rhyme, and pun to add to the beauty of the phonetic structure of the poems

The Role of Additive, Adversative and Causative Connectives in Text Cohesion

Qolam Ali Fallah

In Persian language and generally in all other languages connectives are considered among the most important devices in the coherence of texts. However, there are some other elements such as adverbs and prepositions that operate in the text and function like conjunctions. These are only a few of the elements that connect sentences in a text to each other. We can classify these elements from different perspectives. One of these perspectives isHalliday’s functional theory. In his theoryHalliday calls the semantic, verbal, syntactic and logical connections of the sentences in text coherence. From this point of view, in addition to connectives, the other factors that affect the coherence of the text are reference, displacement, elision, and lexical cohesion. Because of the extent of the subject, the researchers in this article study only one of these factors, namely connection. Among different factors of connection, only non-temporal connectives that include simple, compound, explicative and allegorical connectives; contrastive connection factors including simple and compound connectives; and causal connection factors such as the common and reverse will be studied.

About “KabkShekastan”

Sayyed Morteza Mirhashemi

Persian is a language that accepts combination.This tendency has made some of the poets and authors try to create new combinations. Nizami of Ganje is one of the poets in whose works hundreds of these new combinations are seen. On the one hand because of his high intelligence and talent and on the other hand because the people of his time looked for new subjects and new expressions, and also due to the natural evolvement of language, he has paid special attention to this issue. Although Nizami does not limit himself to certain combinations, on the whole the frequency of allusive combinations is high in his works. One of these combinations is that of"kabkshekastan", which the narrator of Ganje has used in Khosro and Shirin and Sharafname three times. The meanings written for this allusive combination in dictionaries are as follows: "to flirt", "to efface the track" and "to hide secrets". Although on the construction of this combination no explanation has been given, we may offer a few conjectures. What we attempt to explain in this research concerns this combination and its meaning in dictionaries. The research is an endeavor to find out how much these meanings are reliable and if there is another possible meaning for this term.