Investigating Deviations in the Poems of Khalilullah Khalili

The Persian language still has its audience outside Iran. It has been blended with many people’s body and soul around the world and they love it. Afghanistan is an example of such countries. Although in some points in time contemporary politicians showed less concern for the Persian language due to political reasons, this language have always been used by various groups of people, survived and welcomed by people. Khalilullah Khalili (1907-1987) is one of the most renowned contemporary Persian poets of Afghanistan whose poems have been affected by various factors such as poetic language, the environment, war, local languages and dialects etc. Some deviations from standard Persian can be detected in his poems. The present article aiming at better recognizing features of contemporary Persian poetry in Afghanistan attempts were made to study deviations in the poems of this afghan poet on eight levels: semantic, grammatical, phonological, historical period, graphological, lexical, stylistic, and dialectal and to answer the following questions:-          What are different types of deviation in Khalilullah Khalili’s poems?
-          What is the most significant type of deviation in Khalilullah Khalili’s poems? The present study was done on the poems of Khalilullah Khalili using descriptive-analytical approach based on library resources. This study was carried out based on Leech’s (1968) categorization of types of deviation from literary language. It should be noted that while studying deviations in the poems of Khalilullah Khalili, the present research sought to discuss issues related to the surface structure of the poetry and not the ones related to its semantic, deep structure. Therefore, archaism through allusions and archaic proper names were not studied in this research. Also, in some articles published in this field, phonological deviations such as epenthesis, assimilation, lenition, etc. have been mentioned. Since such concepts or the like in Khalilullah Khalili’s poems did not lead to defamiliarization which made the poems look repetitive, they were not discussed in this article.  Defamiliarization is a crucial concept in literary criticism that was first proposed by Russian formalists. “Defamiliarization includes techniques that make the poetic language unfamiliar for the audience and against their linguistic habits. These techniques cause changes in all literary works and make the ordinary language unfamiliar”. (Alavimoghaddam, 1998: 107) Different phenomena gradually become familiar for us and we do not perceive them well. Thus, in order to be better understood, phenomena should be defamiliarized. Defamiliarization in the world of text includes all the techniques involved in highlighting a literary text and is usually associated with a kind of “deviation”. Foregrounding in literature usually takes place through deviation in language. Geoffrey Leech (1968) considers deviation from the standard language as foregrounding. Foregrounding is done in two ways:First- deviation: which is also called unexpected irregularity falls within the scope of rhetorical devices and produces poetry (Shamisa, 1999: 163). Deviation is defined as “deviation from the rules of standard language and its inconsistency with the conventional language, although it does not mean any deviation from the standard language”. (Anousheh, 1997: 1445)
Second- parallelism: or unexpected regularity which means the rules added to the language (Vahidian Kamyar, 2004b: 271). Despite deviation, parallelism does not entail deviation from the rules of language. Parallelism is at a level below deviation because poetry is the result of deviations and regularity is the outcome of parallelism (Barani, 2003:63). Parallelism is any rhythm that can be studied on phonological, lexical and syntactic levels. According to the Leech’s (1986) model, deviation from the standard language occurs in 8 types: syntactic, lexical, phonological, historical period, stylistic, dialectal and graphological.
In ancient and modern Persian literature different instances of deviation can be detected in the works of great poems. It can be said that the frequency of such deviations is high in the poems of most poets who created new trends in Persian poetry. Khalilullah Khalili (1907-1987) was contemporary Afghanistan’s Persian poet. He is one of the rare, noted Afghan poets whose intellectual and written works are not only an honor for his own country, but also shine forever in the history of Dari Persian literature. Amounting to fifty, his works are all considered great instances of Persian prose and poetry. Khalilullah Khalili’s poems are reminiscent of the ancient poets and equivalent to the poems of Badiozzaman Forouzanfar, Bahar and Farrokhi in terms of composition and consistency of meaning. He followed the Khorasani style and added innovations literally and semantically. Khalilullah Khalili tries to communicate as simply and beautifully as is common in the Khorasani style. However, some deviations can be found in his poems. Arising automatically to express emotions, sensations and poetic themes, such deviations have caused his poetic language to become different from the standard Persian language.  A look into the poems of Khalilullah Khalili revealed that the poetic and literary language of Khalilullah Khalili is very different from the standard language. Although his poetic language is simple and far from any complexity and he was mainly concerned with simply conveying his poetic thoughts and feelings, Khalili’s poetic subconscious mind expressed poetic ideas in such a way that caused deviations in his artistic creation. To create an effective poetic language, he deviated from poetic norms in various areas. His poems were analyzed in terms of deviation on eight levels: semantic, grammatical, phonological, historical period, lexical, graphological, stylistic and dialectal and it was found that such deviations fell in the semantic category and were applied more frequently and more significantly than other levels of deviation using figures of speech such as simile, metaphor, metonymy and sometimes paradoxical images. In addition, there were deviations on historical period, dialectal, stylistic and grammatical levels that added to the beauty and effectiveness of his poems. Deviations on the phonological level did not affect Khalili’s poems and graphological deviations were not found in his poems due to the traditional style and structure of his poems.