Structural and Stylistic Analysis of Sanāī's Makātīb (Epistles)

Sanāī is the prominent Iranian poet of the 6th century. Besides his poems, a few epistles have remained from him. Professor Nazir Ahmad assembled them in a book entitled Makātīb-e Sanāī. This article aims at analyzing the structure and the stylistic features of these epistles in order to show the gradual evolution of Persian prose from simple to technical style. The results of this research indicate that the style of this book is between simple and technical and in fact it is a sample of epistolary prose which is more technical. A general look at some other prose works of literature at the same period shows that in the earlier works such as Chāhār Maghāleh the features of technical style are less and in the later ones such as Monsha‘āt-e-Khāghānī are more. Therefore, it can be concluded that as Sanāī’s epistles were written at a middle stage, there is a kind of balance in them between simple and technical style. Moreover, the difference between the structure of some epistles and the fact that they were not gathered by Sanāī in a collection leaves the doubt in the attribution of all of them to him.