Deviations in the Poetry of Nizar Qabbani

Deviation is one of the techniques Russian formalists discuss in their criticism theories. This is an effective method to foreground matters in a literary work that can be easily defined as departure from normal and standard language. Its usage, as an expressional technique (or somehow trick) can lead speech in to dynamicity and makes the audience to pay more attention to the text. Geoffrey Neil Leech (1936-2114), the English linguist, believes that de-familiarization in literary language is put in to effect in two ways of "foregrounding" and "deviation". He has distinguished eight different types of deviation in a literary work. Through an analytic-descriptive method, different types of deviation have been analyzed in present essay on the basis of Leech's theory in the poems of the Syrian well-known contemporary poet, Nizar Qabbani, published in his work "Kitab al-hubb" (Book of Love). The results show that Nizar Qabbani has used different types of deviations in his poetry and there is no "stylistic" deviation in this work, while "semantic" and "phonetic" deviations have been used with a high frequency.