فصلنامه متن پژوهی ادبی
پیاپی 100 (تابستان 1403)

Reading and reciting the Shahnameh in Persian was popular not only in Persianate lands, like some parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia, but in Ottoman empire as well. Furthermore, some of the stories of the Shahnameh were known through oral tradition. Copying and making illuminated manuscripts of the Shahnameh was another method of spreading the fame of Ferdowsi. Ferdowsi, like many other poets of Iran, had considerable influence on the Ottoman literature. The present article examines translations and imitations of the Shahnameh in Turkish Lands.

The second half of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in European aesthetics. It was also a time of increasing contact between Europe and Asia. The rise of Oriental literary scholarship was a natural outgrowth of the public interest in things Oriental. While the earlier part of the century had sought to reaffirm the basic tenets of the Enlightenment with the help of its indirect knowledge of the Oriental literatures, the later generations became increasingly fascinated with the new possibilities of the literary heritage of the East. The Shahnameh first attracted the attention of the eighteenth-century Orientalists such as Sir William Jones as the supreme example of Oriental epic poetry. The present essay proposes to study Jones's conception of Persian literature and his remarks on the poetry of Firdawsi, as well as his fragmentary translations of the Shahnameh.

The purpose of this study is to analyze Basil Bunting's literary translation. It turns to the theories of translation by Steiner, Benjamin, and Eco, among others, to study Bunting’s translation of Rūdhakī’s ‘Dandaniyyeh’ poem, a 10th century qaṣīdah replete with mesmerizing musicality and with a form galvanized in its originating language, time, and locale. A deep contrastive analysis of its translation into English by the poet, Bunting, shows the difficulties that can arise from literal translations of classical Persian poetry.

In “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh” by Mehdi Akhavān Sāles (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: The poem becomes decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition of epic storytelling. This paper examines the relationship between language, perception, self, time, and world created through the fiction of storytelling. Drawing on theories of perception, narrative time, and epic performance, our discussion touches upon the nature of “I” and “we”, the shifting narrative grounds and identities enacted by the narration, the imbrication of past and present in the figure of the storyteller, and the memory spaces that are created both in and through the text. The imaginary speech act of the storyteller casts the reader as audience, while at the same time, the epic past is overlayed by a tumble-down present. Language itself becomes incommensurable with what it describes. Rather than a nostalgic invocation of a lost age of epic heroes, as has often been claimed, ĀKHAR-E SHĀHNĀMEH emerges as the profoundly modern diagnosis of a split consciousness that affects the individual in a society that can no longer return to epic naïveté.

This paper’s aim is to present a comparative study of the poetry of the American James Arlington Wright and the Persian Sohrab Sepehri in order to examine the main ground of convergence in their poetry, which is epiphany or sudden revelation of truth. This revelation is mostly informed by intuitive, as opposed to logical, thinking and a mystical union with nature and natural elements. The poetic art of both Sepehri and Wright precisely consists in reminding the readers of the necessity of redefining and reconstructing the self through an awakening based on spiritual moments. In both Sepehri and Wright, the magic moments are presented through epiphany whose mission is to alert the soul to the absence/presence of what matters, and to the ways of dealing with the problem.

This article offers a detailed study of a story by one of the giants of Persian literature, Farid al-din Attār. It particularly focuses on the character of Attār’s “The Pious Woman”, who emerges as a symbol of faithfulness and discusses her significance as a character of mystical proportion and grandeur that also appears as personification of virtue in a world dominated by acquisitive and lascivious men. In many aspects, the Pious Woman reminds one of Penelope in Homer’s The Odyssey who is also celebrated for her faithfulness to her husband and for her patience and feminine virtues.

In this article, the status of the Persian novel has been investigated via an interdisciplinary approach during the last hundred years. The research starts with the emergence of the Persian novel and continues up to the 2010s/1390s A.H., and it looks into the selected novels from a sociological outlook, i.e., studying literature within its social, cultural, political and historical context. The introduction of modernism into the Iranian society paved the way for the advent of this newly emerging type of literature in Persian literary tradition. Moreover, changes in the political and social structure of the Iranian society led to the establishment and the formation of various periods in the history of the Persian novel. Besides, communication with the modern world and accordingly familiarity with modern world literature through translation had also a considerable role in this process of transformation. To support the claims made in this research, examples will be presented from different novels written during the aforementioned period.

Hooshang Golshiri’s “My little Chapel” relates the story of a character who finds himself in possession of a toe-like protrusion from the beginning of his life, an abnormality which brings him into a never-ending conflict with his surroundings. The obsessional attachment of the narrator with his sixth-toe, however, poses significant questions regarding the nature of his symptomatic dependence on this apparently useless piece of flesh. Through a psychoanalytical reading of the story, the present article is an attempt to shed light on the psychological intricacies of this problematic relation. Drawing on the teachings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, it argues that the only solution to this enigma is to consider the toe as a materialization of the pure nothingness and lack which, from a psychoanalytical point of view, marks the very core of the subject in the symbolic universe and becomes the only venue for the safe flowing of jouissance. Through its inert presence, the toe embodies the Lacanian objet a as the most precious, albeit illusory, thing in the psychic life of the human beings, the removal, or the disclosure, of which could lead to irreparable consequences.