Analysis of Narrative Temporality in Azaryazdi's ‎Rewritten Stories of Mathnavi for Children, Based on ‎Genette’s and Nikolajeva's Theories‎

Mehdi Azaryazdi is among the most influential authors in the field of children's and adolescents’ literature and one of the pioneers in the field of rewriting and recreating old Persian tales. He translated stories from ancient works such as Qabus-Nameh, Marzban-Nameh, Sindbad-Nameh, Kalileh and Damneh, Bustan, Golestan, and especially Mathnavi, into the contemporary language, and in this way, laid the ground to accurately transfer human concepts to the today's generation. He rewrote and recreated these works based on the principle that every child's literary work inevitably reveals a view about childhood and every author has a child created by his own mind (Khosrownejad, 2010: 26).This research aimed to investigate three important rewritten stories from Mathnavi, i.e., the story of the merchant and the parrot, the disagreement over the qualities and the shape of the elephant, and the condemning by Moses -may peace be upon him- of the shepherd's devotional prayer, using the documentary study method and based on Genette's theory of narrative temporality. These stories are presented in the book Good Stories for Good Children under the titles of "The Merchant and the Parrot", "The Elephant in the Dark", and "Moses and the Shepherd".