The Investigation of Appearances and Manifestation of Foregrounding in Khaghani Odes

Khaqani is one of the greatest Iranian poets of the 6th century (A.H.). It is generally acknowledged that in order to understand Khaqani's complex language and difficult meanings, his reader should have a good command over his mystical language, his syntactic and semantic elements as well as his style of expression. In Persian poetry, Khaqani is considered to be an iconoclastic figure who has his own unique style. His odes, due to their incomparable niceties, wonderful combination of words and use of difficult rhyme schemes, can be studied from modem literary perspectives, including formalism. That is because the skills that he consciously uses transform his automatic poetic language into a language that has foregrounding properties which can in turn help us to get a new view of things around us and lead to de-familiarization in a literary work. This paper attempts to touch upon the special characteristics of Khaqani's poetry, based on a formalistic approach. In addition, it tries to demonstrate that the poet presents new concepts and meanings and that the existence of certain old and stereotypical ideas adroitly transformed into new forms and clothed in language decorations highlighted with deviation do not reduce the worth of his poetry.