Broken Lyres: Epic, Performance, and History in Mehdi Akhavān Sāles’ “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh”
Journal Title: Literary Text Research - Year 2024, Vol 28, Issue 100
Abstract
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.
Authors and Affiliations
Marie Huber
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP723050
- DOI 10.22054/LTR.2023.76189.3762
- Views 73
- Downloads 0
Broken Lyres: Epic, Performance, and History in Mehdi Akhavān Sāles’ “Ākhar-e Shāhnāmeh”
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...
Poetry of Epiphany: James Wright and Sohrab Sepehri
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...
Sir William Jones and the Shahnameh
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 outgr...
A Psychoanalytic Approach to Hooshang Golshiri’s “My Little Chapel”
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 conflic...
Basil Bunting and the Challenges of Literary Translation from Persian into English: A Case of Rūdhakī
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’...