A Study of the types and functions of repetition in Vis and Rāmin

Repetitionis a fundamental issue in aesthetics of art and plays a very important role in literature and, in particular, in poetry. Repetitions can also exert an influence on aesthetic aspects of a literary work in case of being appropriately applied. On the other hand, from a stylistic point of view, repetitioncan reflect the author’s individual style. In fact, full repetitionand partial repetition are two ways to create elegance in speech and also to establish music of rhyme in poetry which are considered to be of fundamental elements in poetry. Therefore, all the verbal tricks and even meter and rhyme are created based on repetition. Repetitionis pleasant since repeating something reminds us of that thing again and perceiving this unity pleases us. It is obvious that Fakhr od-Din Asad recognizes the internal and external music of poetry correctly and applies it widely.
He has applied repetitionin various ways to exert more influence and to make the poem more pleasing: on one hand, like other poets in Khorāsānīstyle, Fakhr od-Din Asad has applied repetitionvery gracefully and on the other hand, a large number of these repetitionsstem from Pahlavi texts and from the origins of the story in which there were a great deal ofredundancy and also various images and sentences. Figures of speech created through balance do not have similar essence, so different types of balance should be considered in different analytical levels. Here, balance has been used in its widest sense i.e. each type of music and meter which can be considered in the level of phonological, lexical and syntactic and is created through verbal repetition. This does not mean that the above-mentioned analytical levels are separated from each other since most of figures of speech should be considered through the elements of more than one level. The occurrence of phonological balance is more than lexical balance and the frequency of lexical balance is higher than that of syntactic balance.
Phonological balance is a kind of verbal balance created through the repetition of all phonemes and enhances the musical aspect of poem. This kind of balance is divided into two qualitative and quantitative parts. Qualitative phonological balance is a kind of phoneme repetition creating alliteration and quantitative phonological balance creates the meter of the poem. Phonemic balance refers to those phonological repetitions which happen in one syllable and is divided into two parts:1. Assonance: the repetition of one high-frequency consonant in a sentence
2. Consonance: the repetition and distribution of vowels in words.
One of the figures of speech which can be considered regarding to phonemic balance is alliteration. On the other hand, phonemic balance refers to those parts of phonemic repetitions which are created through collocation of some syllables and, in general, leads to poetry.
Lexical balance is another kind of balance created through a language unit which is larger than syllable. In the other word, lexical balance is not limited to repetition of some syllables in a word rather it can include the repetition of a whole word, a noun or a verb phrase or even a set of words in a sentence. By the way, similarity between two or more repetitive words can be regarded as partial or full. The difference between phonological and lexical balance is related to the point that lexical balance is created through the repetition of two or more words or grammatical elements which are larger that syllable in structure while, phonological balance is created by the repetition of two or more language units which are smaller than word i.e. syllable or phoneme.
Repetition is exerted to the lexical level partially or fully resulting in establishing a set of figures of speech. The repetition of word with partial similarity can be seen in some figure of speech such as different kinds of saj', pun, and also in Leonine verse (tarsi’) and counterbalance (movaazene). Full similarity includes a grammatical morpheme or larger elements like words, phrases and even sentence. It should be said that, therefore, lexical balance is not only limited to repetition in level of word rather it includes grammatical elements larger than word such as radif, radif alqafyh, rad alsadr alala’jz, rad al’ajz alalsadr, homophonic pun, compounded pun etc. It is worth saying that homophonic or compounded puns are a complete similarity between two grammatically different elements so they can be analyzed in this section. Repetition in level of phrase: phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit and can be regarded as full or partial. Repetition in level of sentence: in Persian, each sentence consist of at least two grammatical elements i.e. verb and subject (shenaseh). Here, repetition can also be considered fully or partially.
Syntactic balance: in this section, it should be said that syntactic balance does not necessarily include phonological repetition although, at times, poet may benefit from phonological repetition while creating syntactic balance. Syntactic balance can be created through collocating the elements with similar part of speech or by displacing and replacing the elements of a sentence. Collocating the elements with similar part of speech includes some figures of speech such as laf-o-nashr, division (taqsim), numbers (a’dad), tansiq os-sefat etc. In part of speech replacement by displacing the elements of a sentence a new sentence is created which bear a syntactic balance with previous sentence.
The functions of repetition in Vis and Rāmin are as follow:Euphoniousness, stating feelings and emotions, inducing meaning, emphasizing on a specific meaning, creating unity between poet and reader, explaining and interpreting the meaning of the poem, developing creativity and fertility of meaning, creating new terms and structures, emphasizing on poet’s inner feelings, perpetuating an action or a state, creating various entries in the poems, inducing specific meanings through repetition of morphemes.