volume Number 9، number In Volume 4، Winter 2017 ، issue Number 34

A Stylistic Inquiry into Mehrdad Avesta’s Qasidas

Khadijeh Pourzeini(Author in Charge), Mohammad Khakpour

Abstract

Persian qasida left its earlier flourishing epoch behind to take a downward trend in the seventh century AH and would only revive with its original tenets in the so-called Constitutional Period of the Iranian history inspired by certain social developments. The present work undertakes a survey of the style characterizing the qasidas by Mehrdad Avesta, a prominent figure in the modern Persian qasida who contributed to the restoration of the traditional version of the genre. Attempts were thus made here to explore his qasidas in the three linguistic, literary and intellectual levels to pin down the extent to which they tallied with the original principles and norms of the genre. His unrelenting dedication to studying classic works, in particular old qasidas, brought him the mastery over the nuances of the Khorasani School, which was deftly employed by him. The language of his qasidas both morphologically and syntactically reflects many properties of the Khorasani School, as it does phonologically. It displays differences however as far as the literal and intellectual levels are considered, and in said areas Avesta managed to enrich the archaic style with the accomplishments of the New Persian Poetry. While Avesta’s works retain the same language of the old school, his characteristic imagination coupled with personal experiments enabled him to communicate his emotional and spiritual states via his poems. To illustrate the intellectual level of Avesta’s qasidas, they were split into the following thematic classes: 1) eulogies including those on popular personages such as Imam Khomeini; 2) lyrics; 3) social qasidas dealing with the affairs prior to, in the course of and in the wake of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, particularly the Iran-Iraq war; 4) description; and 5) complaints.

Keyword
Avesta , Qasida , Stylistics , Khorasani School , Linguistic level , Literary level , Intellectual level

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