Lexical Compoundings in Nezami's Panj Ganj

Nezami Ganjavi is one of the great Persian poets that expanded storytelling, poetic language, and imagery in Persian language and poetry. The attention of literary scholars has been paid to his mastership of storytelling, spheres of his thoughts and his poetic images but less focus has been on his poetic language, especially his derivational compounds or compounding. In this essay, this aspect of his poetic language is studied on the basis of Russian formalism attitudes which hold that the specific characteristic of poetic discourse is linguistic defamiliarization. Also it is discussed that one poet may not coin or create a “simple word”, but the art of a great poet like Nezami is creating new compounds and derivational compounds. In Nezami’s works these compounds were created for foregrounding the poetic language and expressing new and different conditions and situations in the story world. In this essay the different compounds in Nezami’s works are classified and analyzed. The conclusion of this essay is that the new compounds and derivational compounds in Nezami’s works are so vast and so interesting that we can say this is his dominant poetic language and his narrative rhetoric.