Journal of Poetry Studies (Boostan Adab)
Year:2013 | Volume:4 | Issue:4 (14)|Papers Count:11

Breaking norms is one of the most effective ways for making the language prominent, and composing unfamiliar poems. It has been used by poets for a long time. Hooshang Irani is one of the poets who has widely used this technique in his poems. Literary critics try to answer how Irani has employed this technique in his poems to break the norms. Some studies show that he usually used different strategies to perform this technique and these strategies are not the same in all his poems. One of the most popular kinds of norm-breaking is a written one used in different forms. One of his norm-breaking strategies is related to time in two ways: diction and syntax. His norm-breaking is also seen in the figures of speech such as simile, personification, synsthesia, and paradoxical images. In addition to syntax and diction, he employed this technique in sounds, as well.

The Elegy of cities is one kind of elegy in which a poet describes the stricken cities, pains and agonies of people of the cities undergone destruction and devastation. This research is a historical - comparative study of this genre in Persian and Arabic literature. It shows that these elegies in both Arabic and Persian Literature have the same political and internal reasons, such as the assault and the attack of the foreigners to the Islamic realms. Consequently, the Iranian and Arabic poets referred to this event as the calamity of the Muslim Ummah. They elegize about the Islamic cities regardless of geographical and linguistic boundaries. In addition, the Religious and cultural commonalities of the Arabic and Persian literary scholars lead to a one-sided point of view towards many concepts of the city elegies which is very telling of the connection between two Ummahs since the ancient times. These Persian and Arabic odes are similar in their use of sincere and honest sentiments, plain and modest diction and also because of their pervasion with wisdom, advice and religious concepts such as fatalism. These elegies are also considered as part of a historical source of the stricken cities.

Contemporary Arabic and Persian poetry is a process seeking to reflect all human concerns. Feelings, aims, accomplishments, failures and all human-related issues have a significant place in contemporary poetry. One of the humanistic issues in the modern age refers to the limitations preventing human beings from reaching the intended aim. These limitations, sometimes, emerge in the form of elements remarkably imposing themselves on human life. But what is more surprising is the way human beings get accustomed to these limitations. However, with all these limitations, the passionate souls and enthusiastic minds of some people who welcome such great obstacles and who fight against them emerge; the people such as: the Egyptian poet, Amal Donghol, and the Persian poet, Nosrat Rahmani. This paper presents a general overview of the revolt phenomenon in the poems of these poets and also wants to offer the noteworthy samples of these limitations such as self, society, and new age to portray the similarity of these poets in confrontation with such limitations. This study reveals that the common motives in these two languages lead to the formation of similar confrontation of Donghol and Rahmani with the limitations.

This study examines the influence of Ferdowsi on Malek-o-shoara Bahar’s poetry. Accordingly, with a brief review of Bahar’s academic career and his studies of Shahname, these influences can be studied under three categories: 1. the praising of Shahname and Ferdowsi; 2. the use of epic settings and descriptions; and 3. the application of the allusions of Shahname in his Divan. Examples of these influences are extracted from his Divan and, in some cases, their relations with the sociopolitical issues have been studied. Bahar, in the different stages of his life, has had different attitudes towards political issues and accordingly has got various influences from Shahname.

The most important and fundamental yet hidden concept in Nima’s Manli and Shamlu’s Roxana is the belief in an ideal world beyond the reach of the real world as well as the existence of a pessimistic and loathsome attitude towards the real world and also the efforts to create and evoke a world full of serenity and success, so that one lives away from the turbulence, instability, pain, fever and fret of this world. Since Nima was influenced by the 19th century French Symbolism, it can be concluded that he, also, was under the influence of Transcendental Symbolism as it is reflected in some of his poems dealing with the ideal world and transcendental symbols. This article is a comparative study trying to highlight the similarities of the aforementioned poems. It attempts to show how both Shamlu and Nima look at the real world and how they portray their belief in an ideal world in their poems. This article probes the background of this belief and the reasons behind it. It tries to show how Nima hopefully and resolutely steps in his utopian world while Shamlu, who was suspicious of it, fails to go beyond the realistic world, despite his efforts.

A comparative study of different narrations of an epic, especially its oral versions would Certainly lead to a deeper understanding of its various aspects. One of the Iranian epics, narrated differently at least in three versions, is the story of Bahman's death. Bahman, the son of Esfandyar, is the first hero of the Iranian epic who is killed by a dragon. Studying the reasons of this unprecedented issue would clarify the vague points of it, because fighting with and killing a dragon has been a substantial heroic touchstone in all cultures and in different parts of the world. In the present paper, firstly the theme of killing a dragon by heroes is investigated in Iranian epics and then with the help of important characteristics of these heroes, such as benefiting from splendor, "farrah" ["glory" or divine mystical charisma], these heroes are classified in two categories. Secondly, the different narrations are collected and classified in three categories. Finally, by analyzing Bahman's death and considering the presence of Azar-Barzin, the grandson of Rostam in two different functions, the origin of the probable reasons of this grave inauspicious destiny of Bahman is investigated.

The first two lines of the narrative of Rostam and Sohrab are among controversial lines of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. Many researchers have presented different ideas about the different forms of reading the two ending words of each line shaping the rhyme of the poem and also the different meanings of the first word, Konj. The writer in this paper has reviewed main opinions of the interpreters and then by focusing on a collection of literary and linguistic notes has tried to affirm that we can read this word in two forms: kanj and konj meaning the mountain-side and valley.

Shahnameh is an epic combined of historical and mythological elements forming the narrative. The mixture of history and myth in Shahnameh, and the transformation of its source stories during the course of time before Ferdowsi's attempt at versifying them have made the structure of the stories complicating; therefore, the reader feels that he is reading a bunch of dissimilar and distinct stories. However, the deep structure underlying all these varieties is the same. The universal myth of ‘killing of the dragons’ is one of the few deep structures of Shahnameh. In this study, seventeen stories in which killing of the dragon serves as the deep structure have been investigated. This study shows that "the myth of killing of the dragon" underlies other stories as well-the stories which are apparently irrelevant to this myth-since the fundamental structure of all stories lies in the binary opposition of fertility and sterility of nature.