Recasting Persian Poetry: Scenarios of Poetic Modernity in Iran.

• Author: Ghanoonparvar, M.R.

By AHMAD KARIMI-HAKKAK. Salt Lake City: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS, 1996. Pp. xi + 335. $44.

In this well-written and persuasively argued book, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak chronicles the development of Persian poetry in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Theoretically, Karimi-Hakkak draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogical principle and Yuri Lotman's diachronic principle to show the process of change in Persian poetry. The beginning of this change is exemplified in an incident in the mid-nineteenth century at the court of Nasereddin Shah, where the reform-minded prime minister, Amir Kabir, chastizes the poet Habibollah Qaani for "lying" in a panegyric qasida in honor of the prime minister. Amir Kabir, of course, saw poetry in general and the type of poetry that had developed during the Qajar period as detrimental to "progress" and "modernization" in Iranian society, which was in dire need of change. Such extra-literary concerns, KarimiHakkak explains, were expressed increasingly by others, such as Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh, Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, and Mirza Malkom Khan, who also saw a need for change in Persian poetry in literary terms as well, always, however, linking it to social concerns.

Given the social and political climate of Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which led to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11, the idea that Persian poetry must change in a way that would reflect the realities of a country in transition gradually became widespread and was propagated by such notable literary figures as Ali Akbar Dehkhoda and Abolqasem Aref, who challenged the traditional system of Persian poetry by introducing new content as well as experimenting with rhetorical, lexicosemantic, and structural aspects of poetry. While Dehkhoda, for instance, uses a lesser-known traditional form, the mosammat, to elegize an executed revolutionary journalist, Aref employs the ghazal, "the most central genre within the lyrical tradition" (p. 88), to write his "Payam-e Azadi" (Message of Freedom).

Karimi-Hakkak pursues his chronicle of poetic change in Iran with the poets Mohammad Taqi Bahar and Taqi Rafat and their debate on the nature of poetic modernity. While both poets and like-minded members of their respective circles were by this time convinced of the necessity of a "literary revolution," Bahar still believed in the preservation of traditional forms and devices, while Rafat advocated "radical literary modernism" and...