Exploring The Dialectic of Presence and Absence in Bijan Elahi's Poems: An Emphasis on Martin Heidegger's Views on Phenomenological Interpretation

Heidegger, whose philosophy mainly focused on the question of existence, believed that poetry provided a way out of the metaphysical crisis of modernity. For Heidegger, poetry is the happening of truth, which he refers to as a-lêtheia. Heidegger develops a-lêtheia as the essential strife between world and earth. In Heidegger's terminology, ‘world’' and ‘earth’ refer to the dialectic of presence and absence, which he explored in his essay The Origin of the Work of Art. Heidegger examined this dialectic through the perspectives of both the artist and the audience. As for the audience, the dialectic finds expression for phenomenological interpretation. Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of Vincent van Gogh’s painting of “A Pair of Shoes” shows such dialectic. Phenomenological interpretation based on the dialectic of presence and absence is the audience’s knowledge, which grows, like the world, from the earth of art and then conflicts with it. ‘She’r e digar , which literally means ‘other poetry’, is a literary movement in contemporary Persian literature containing phenomenological interpretation. Moreover, some poets of this movement, such as Bijan Elahi, Hoshang Azadivar, Hoshang Chalangi, Bahram Ardabili, Mahmoud Shojaei, and Firoz Naji, are acquainted with Heidegger's ideas about poem and truth, as expressed in their speeches and writings. Thus, this paper seeks to explain phenomenological interpretation and compare it with Bijan Elahi’s poems, the leading poet of the movement of She’r e dighar, through a descriptive-analytical method, and based on Heidegger’s thoughts such as poetry, disclosure, truth, and the dialectic of presence and absence.