Two Hard-to-Grasp Poets: Khaghani Shervani & Abu Tammam Taei

زبان و ادبیات عربی

Article 2, Volume 5, Issue 8, August 2013   

Document Type: research article

DOI: 10.22067/jall.v5i8.24190

Author

Hossein Imanian^*

Abstract

Since the second century (lunar calendar) in Arabic literary criticism, the question of whether poetry should stay clear of philosophy, science, and thought or the poet can enjoy using them, has come to the fore. Naturally, before Muslims get familiar with Greek, Indian, and Persian-rooted knowledge, philosophy, culture, and civilization (which were under the influence of such translations) there was no sign of such arguments. But the time when some of Abbasid poets longed to embellish their art with a tint of knowledge and thought, some conservative and trenchant Arabic-fervid critics rebuked the idea sharply. This skirmish turned into a bitter critical conflict when Abu Tammam employed the aforementioned method both in theory and practice. The altercation between these two groups has in fact been a conflict between the supporters of tradition and modernity in literature, art, and, of course, the society is Abbasid epoch. In Persian literature Khaghani’s poems are the most identical to Abu Tammam’s. Khaghani also believed that a poet should not talk in a way that be grasped easily and this is the audience who have to increase his knowledge in order to understand the poet’s tongue. The method these two poets adopted in Persian and Arabic literature came to be known as “Technical School”. Poet, in this method, expresses his lofty thoughts aesthetically. The present study investigates the unintelligible aspects of Khaghani’s and Abu Tammam’s poems. The hard-to-grasp aspect of these two poets’ poems has occasionally been a corollary of the style of these two formalist artists and at times a feature of using wonderful themes and philosophical and logical meanings as well as historical and mythical allusions

Keywords

Abu Tammam; Khaghani; hard-to grasp; artistic ambiguity; form; technical method; defamiliarization