JOURNAL OF KURDISH LITERATURE
Year:2020 | Volume:6 | Issue:1 (9)|Papers Count:13

National heritage has always been an important resource for modern Kurdish poets. This stems from the belief that many internal, social, intellectual, political, and even educational aspects of the Kurdish people are demonstrated within their national heritage. These aspects are deeply rooted in the nation, expressed in a simple language, and nationally accepted. As one of the modernist Kurdish poets, Kakey Falah understood the importance of this national capital, and according to the content and concepts of his poems, tried to make use of the different aspects of this heritage such as proverbs and idioms, legend, poetry, story, songs, tradition, etc. Connecting his era to the past, he highlighted the fact that the present is the linking chain of the past and the future. For this reason, the present research seeks to show the quality and quantity of the poet’ s trade with the national heritage.

Society, as the most fundamental factor in the formation of culture and the social structure, carries all aspects of culture, politics, art, and literature. Society and human productions are being produced and reproduced in a comprehensive contrast with each other. Society is thus the fundamental framework directing human actions and activities. Art and literature in particular, as human productions are surrounded by the social as opposed to the past belief considering them the products of taste and creativity and of imaginational nature only. It is illuminating to employ social theories in order to analyze literature and to study it within the framework of society. This is what the sociology of literature is concerned with. Researchers in the field of sociology of literature argue that all stories and other literary works retell the events of their times. The purpose of this research is to study the intellectual and aesthetic structures constructing the collective consciousness in the novel, The Last Pomegranate of the World, based on Lucien Goldmann’ s genetic structuralism. In this approach, the content of a literary work and its relationship with the society the work was created in are studied. Instead of describing the content of a literary work, its content is examined considering its relationship with the worldview of a specific period. The results of the study indicate that in this novel we are faced with three periods of the social-political history of Kurdistan. Both the content and the form of the novel are accompanied by characters each representing a particular period of the social-political history of Kurdistan: Kurdistan before the uprising, Kurdistan after the uprising, when the civil war occurs, and the political and social consequences after the formation of Kurdish political ideas.

This study is an attempt to explore and analyze Mire-Nowrouzi play as a form of resistance based on Mikhail Bakhtin’ s concept of Carnival. For this purpose, in addition to explaining Bakhtin’ s ideas about the construction of the concept of carnival and referring to such concepts as polyphony, laughter, the grotesque body, and action philosophy the formation and representation of these concepts in Mire-Nowrouzi were investigated. The results of the study showed that these concepts have a significant role in giving identity to this social and political play and it can be considered as a form of carnival with both social and political functions. Each actor-audience in the play can influence or be influenced by other characters simultaneously. It means that everyone can hear the voices of others, and each character, inevitably, forms other characters. In the play of Mire-Nowrouzi, participants are seen as a whole with the ability to resist and change their and other’ s status. This influence is interpreted based on Bakhtin’ s concepts.

Literary comparison of two movements, literary traditions or prominent poets, is a ground for recognizing their distinctive or unified themes. Accordingly, in this article, the historical trends of two literary movements of Kurdish poetry have been explored and analyzed. On the one hand, the examples of the repetitive literary features of Goran’ s classical poetry have been emphasized along with its historical and diachronic development. On the other hand, the capabilities of the classical central Kurdish poetry have been addressed which grew and flourished in the vernacular language and oral culture in a specific period of time, by itself and without any previous literary experience. Mawlawi and Nali, each with their own distinguished literary styles, are considered to be the symbols of both the content and the form of these two literary movements. Comparing their styles, therefore, the present study attempts to show the differences between these two poets’ literary styles and influence on their contemporaries and future poets and also to represent the impact of this difference on Abdullah Goran’ s reforming literary style and his modernist efforts. This modernist poet abandoned the structure, form, meter, and music of prosaic poetry and the style of expression and literary tradition of Nali, since he considered it as a borrowed phenomenon in Kurdish poetry, and returned to Mawlawi’ s form, syllabic meter, eloquence and rhetoric the and the literary tradition of Goran in general, and therefore, brought about the modernization of classical Sorani Kurdish poetry.

The study of childhood stage, as a specific concept and period in human life, does not have a long history. According to Philippe Aries, there has been no reference to the concept of childhood in the Middle ages. Unlike in the past, children as intelligent beings are now considered to deserve special attention and analysis. In the past, a child was like an unseen subject, and no value was given to childhood as a unique period of life, however, this view has changed dramatically because of social organizations such as family, education, and the cyber world. One of the significant contexts for thinking and working for children is literature, and among different literary genres, poetry has a specific situation. Contrary to the present viewpoint in the Iranian Kurdistan, children’ s poetry is not easily achieved. The poets are required to have extensive expertise and experience in childhood studies. The main argument of the present study is that Kurdish children’ s poetry does not consider the sensitivity of the childhood period and is not written according to children’ s taste but to adult’ s taste and desire and with minimal knowledge. This paper will first explore the concepts of child and childhood, then will discuss the characteristics of children’ s poetry and try to study several books and pieces of poetry, written and published in Iran in the past few years.

Hafiz is considered as one of the greatest composers of ghazal in Persian literature. His poems are popular and everyone enjoys reading his poetry. It is the conflicted world and the difficult situation resulting from the political pressure of the poet's era combined with his aesthetic sense which led to the production of these valuable poems. Since Hafez talks about the world and the Hereafter, his poems are said to include both mystical heavenly ghazals and worldly love ones. Due to the fact that his poems are considered as world masterpieces, Hafiz had a great influence on the poets all over the world and Kurdish poets are not an exception. The present study seeks to review and evaluate the poetic style of the Kurdish translations of Hafiz by the Kurdish poet, Omar Salih Sahib, published under the title The Love Waterfall. Following a descriptive-analytical method, this paper first addresses translation basics, translation types, and the validity or invalidity of translating poetry. Then, some of the translated ghazals into Kurdish are selected as samples and examined regarding rhythm, rhyme, linguistic aspects, rhetoric, poetic deviation, and all the required poetic techniques.

Kamran Mokri and Farrokhi Yazdi are two prominent poets of Kurdish and Persian literature. As committed and protesting poets, they have served their societies and tied to portray people's pain and suffering in their poetry. They have used their poetry only to protest against oppression and ignorance but also to encourage people to stand against the social, political, and religious oppression and ignorance. Although they have not lived in the same period, it is clear that their living conditions were remarkably similar in the Middle East between World War I and II. For this reason, comparing them seems to be of interest form the comparative literature viewpoint. Outstanding national thoughts and emotions; continues efforts to clarify the political and social conditions for the readership and the oppressed class, in particular; to face directly with the wrong behaviors and betrayals of the political and governmental figures; to criticize the interference of the foreign powers in the internal affairs; to attack the dishonesty and deceitfulness of the religious figures or those who seek their own social and economic interests in the name of religion, are the similar points representing protest, artistic feelings and deep political-social thoughts in the works of these two poets vividly. A comparison of their beliefs about religion and religious concepts indicates a minor difference in their viewpoints on religion. Religion as a social foundation and even a historical concept is used in Farrokhi’ s works to bring different classes together, however, it is not depicted in this way in Mokri’ s works and it is not even referred to negatively.

Orientational metaphor is one kind of the three types of conceptual metaphor. It was introduced by Lakoff and Johnson for the first time in the 1980s. They argue that metaphor is a fundamental element not only in the language of poetry and literature but also in everyday language. The direction in the orientational metaphor is apparently meaningful and often biaxial and bipolar. Lakoff and Johnson’ s ideas evolved later and developed into a theory with the required principles and foundations. This research, using a descriptive-documentary method, seeks to study the orientational metaphor and its position in Abdullah Pashew’ s poetry as a prominent intellectual modernist Kurdish poet. The language of Pashew’ s poetry is literary and culturally rich and at the same time close to the daily language of people and for this reason, it contains a vast number of words and idioms, and literary and technical terms and phrases. The samples of the orientational metaphor in his poetry are mostly biaxial/polar and are presented in above/below, far/near, forward/back, long/short forms, and other similar binary directions.

Mountain has been regarded as the preserver of identity for Kurds. The Kurdish language and literature are rich in vocabulary regarding mountain, in a way that there are more than 200 words for it in Kurdish language. Living in the mountains from 1985 to 1986, Shirko Bikas, contemporary Kurdish poet, wrote ‘ mountain poetry’ against the Baath regime. He has formed a symbolic stock of vocabulary different from the general vocabulary of mountain in his poems. He has used the symbol of mountain in different ways, sometimes in an artistic way and sometimes as a motto. Symbol, as an artistic trope, is intertwined with ambiguity and vagueness. In poetry, a symbol is an artistic arena to oppose social and political injustice and oppression. Using the mountain as a symbol in his poetry, Shirko Bikas has given a wide variety of meanings to it, such as freedom, poverty, body and soul, struggle, city, and sacredness, which are all different from the meaning and symbol of mountain in the general vocabulary. The prominence of narrative in Shirko Bikas’ s poetry has led to the narration of history in the form of poetry. This has caused a little weakness in the poetic characteristics, discourse, and sacredness of the mountain.

The present study is an attempt to analyze the context of the poetic text. The context contains the situation which, because of the agreement between the speaker and the listener, reveals the meanings of the words; or a linguistic environment surrounded by words, phrases and sentences; or a group of methods surrounding the speech. Therefore, the role of context is to determine the meaning of signifiers. The context of the text itself becomes another signifier formed based on the common signifiers. Since the context itself produces a semantic text and affects the meaning or the mechanism of the text, the context which determines the meaning of the word is a mental context that later joins the language, not the speech. Such a view is different from that of Saussure; Because from his perspective, once the language and then the speech play roles. The contexts, considered as the basis of this study, are the ones introduced by Van Dijk. The reason behind applying Van Dijk’ s classification is that it is much more comprehensive than the other ones. The present study consists of two parts: In the first part, the concept and definition of the text are discussed, then the concept and definition of the context are studied, and different viewpoints are presented. At the end, the value and importance of the context are discussed. In the second section, different types of context are identified in the text, along with the required samples, and the analysis of the contexts based on their meanings.

Addressing the impact of political events on changes in metrical feet is a new approach applied in this paper. Hasanpour and Vali’ s viewpoints on the history of Kurdish nationalism, the relationship between literary texts and political events, and different types of meter in different languages in the world are used in this research. Prosody in Kurdish poetry includes two types of prosodic and syllabic changing from the former to the latter. This study deals with the Middle Kurmanji dialect in the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan from Nali’ s period to the late 1980s. The change of poetic meter from the dominance of prosodic meter to the dominance of syllabic meter in Middle Kurmanji has been regarded as a symptom of changes in Kurdish identity and nationalism. In the author's view, one of the reasons for the changes in meter in Kurdish poetry is the nationalist movement. Therefore, the works of some famous Kurdish poets in the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan are analyzed based on a historical-documentary method and three stages are identified: prosodic, prosodic-syllabic, and syllabic. Changes in the meter in Middle Kurmanji poetry from prosodic to syllabic are simultaneous with the emergence and development of nationalist movements in the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan in World War II.

A mytho-text refers to a text or texts that play a fundamental and structural role in the culture of a nation. These texts are demonstrated as myths and prototypes and, in Heidegger’ s words-create a new world and take on the veil of existence and truth. The openness and directness of these texts lead to cultural continuation and prevent cultural ruptures. These texts will be replicated intertextually by influencing the texts written after them; affecting and being affected, as a myth, they will always remain as a guide in the realm of culture. This paper seeks to study Nali’ s Divan as a mythotext based on the French theorist, Gerard Genette’ s transtextuality. Following the selected method, first, the status of Nali’ s Divan is studied in Kurdish literature and finally, it is proven that his Divan being a mythotext has a very important role and a great impact on Kurdish literature.