Foreword: Sohrab Sepehri Special Issue

Foreword: Sohrab Sepehri Special Issue

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi
University of Chicago

Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari
University of Tehran

This special issue of Iran Namag focuses on one of the most celebrated poets and painters of twentieth-century Iran, Sohrab Sepehri. The four articles in English and six in Persian are written by scholars from Iran, Afghanistan, Europe, and North America, each looking at Sepehri’s poetry from a specific angle. The editors of this special issue hope that researchers and students working on modern Persian literature will find the articles insightful and inspiring for their own research in the field.

Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi is Instructional Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Processing Compound Verbs in Persian: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Complex Predicates (2014) and Translation Metacognitive Strategies (2009). She is co-translator of Sohrab Sepehri’s The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation

(2021), Ali Shabani’s The Thousand Families (2018), Iraj Pezeshkzad’s Hafez in Love (2021), Simin Daneshvar’s Island of Bewilderment (2022), as well as her Bewildered Cameleer (2023). She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (2022).

Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Persian at the University of Tehran. He is the author of Tense in Persian (2002) and co-editor of Essays on Typology of Iranian Languages (2019). He has several encyclopedia entries in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, and the Encyclopedia of Islam, as well as chapters in The World’s Major Languages (2017), Oxford Handbook of Persian Linguistics (2018), and The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian (2020).

The first section of this special issue includes four articles in English. The first article is by Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi and is entitled “Sohrab Sepehri, a Universal Poet: An Introduction to His Life and Works.” As the title suggests, it is a chronological survey of Sepehri’s life and works as a poet and as an artist. Shabani-Jadidi tells the story of the poet’s life through examples from his poetry and highlights several important events leading up to the composition of some of his specific poems. The article also discusses the influence of Sepehri’s painting style on his poetic style and vice versa. Another topic explored in this article is that of the specific linguistic features of Sepehri’s poetry. Readers get to know the poet intimately through this examination of his works.

In the second article, “Sohrab Sepehri as a Mythical Character in Shahrnush Parsipur’s Blue Logos,” M. R. Ghanoonparvar examines the presence and influence of Sepehri’s poetry and art on Parsipur’s 1994 novel Blue Logos. After providing a brief description of the novel, Ghanoonparvar delves into the sections where Parsipur has evoked Sepehri and his poetic message by either quoting his poetry or conjuring up Sepehri as a mythical character. The technique of incorporating excerpts from the pioneers of Persian literature in later literary works has a long history in the cannon of Persian literature, and Ghanoonparvar very skillfully demonstrates that this literary device is still very much practiced.

The third article is by Bahar Davary and is entitled “Ecotheology of Sohrab Sepehri: Consciousness on the Edge of Water.” The author argues that the common perception of Sepehri as a modern mystic is incorrect; rather, he is a poet-philosopher of resistance, love, and justice. Davary argues that Sepehri’s poetry goes beyond Eastern mysticism, reflecting indigenous, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Jain, and other religious traditions and their imageries. Through Davary’s article, readers will be presented with a new approach to Sepehri’s poetry as that of a universal poet.

The final article of the first section is “Transformation of a Concept: ‘Death’ from ‘Resting Place of Love’ to ‘Beauty’s Solitariness’” by Zhinia Noorian. This article examines how the concept of “death” in Sepehri’s poetry has undergone changes through time. The author does this by showing how death is conceptualized in several of Sepehri’s poems.

The second section of this special issue encompasses six articles in Persian. The first of these, “Ata va laqa-yi Sohrab-i Sepehri: Baraye mu‘asiran-ash va baraye imruziyan” (The Offerings and Insights of Sohrab Sepehri for his Contemporaries and for Today), is written by Saeed Yousef and discusses Sepehri’s status among his peers including the influence he had on others and those who influenced him. The author examines Sepehri’s stylistics as a poet, particularly his special imagery, providing a comparative analysis of the latter and the poet’s stylistics in relation to other contemporaneous poets.

In the second article, “Khanish-i tahlili-yi shi‘r-i ‘dust’-i Sohrab-i Sepehri dar charchub-i tahlili intiqadi-yi guftiman-i Firkilaf” (An Analytical Reading of Sohrab Sepehri’s Poem ‘‘Friend’’ Based on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis Framework), Mahdiye Arvin analyzes Sepehri’s poem “Friend” using Norman Fairclough’s  three-step analysis: textual analysis; the production, consumption, and distribution of the text (i.e., interaction); and the interpretation of the text in its social context (i.e., contextual analysis). The author presents several tables illustrating some of the metaphors used by Sepehri with regard to meaning and structure. She also presents the literary devices used by Sepehri and provides a syntactic and semantic analysis of the verbs used in the poem. She then compares Sepehri’s elegy with elegies of a similar style by other contemporaneous poets.

The third article in this section, “Ab ra gil nakunim: Barrasi-yi muqayise-yi guftiman-i sammi (Toxic Discourse) dar shi‘r-i ‘marg-i yik tabi‘atgara’ az  hini va ‘Ab’ az Sohrab Sepheri” (‘Let Us Not Muddy the Water’: A Review and Comparison of Toxic Discourse in the Poems ‘Death of a Naturalist’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘Water’ by Sohrab Sepehri) by Maryam Soltan Shahdtaj Beyad and Faezeh Dashtizad, highlights the similarities and differences in the toxic discourse on the environment of these two poets using Lawrence Buell’s toxic discourse theory.

For Buell, the “major aspects of toxic discourse are a contaminated or disrupted pastoral vision; images of total pollution; gothic elements, including Virgilian descents into polluted underworlds; and ‘David-versus-Goliath’ representations of the weak oppressed against the strong oppressors.”^[1]

The fourth and fifth articles are written by scholars from Afghanistan and examine Sepehri’s poetry through a comparison with contemporary Afghan poets. In the fourth, “Barrasi-yi muqayisiha-yi janbiha-yi namayishi-yi shi‘r-i ‘Musafir’-i Sohrab Sepehri va ‘Yal-i kajkan va izhdiha-yi jahannam’-i Qahhar ‘Asi” (A Comparative Review of the Dramatic Aspects of Sohrab Sepehri’s Poem ‘‘Traveler’’ and Qahhar ‘Asi’s ‘‘The Champion of Kajkan (Panjsher) and the Dragon of Hell’’), Fazel Ahad Ahadi compares the narrative techniques and dramatic aspects of these two poems as well as several other works by Sepehri and ‘Asi. Ahadi also studies elements of the short story in the authors’ narrative poetry.

In the fifth article, “Sohrab Sepehri va ta‘sir-i vey bar shi‘r-i mu‘’asir-i fārsi dar hoze-yi Afghanistan” (Sohrab Sepehri and His Influence on Modern Persian Poetry in Afghanistan), Eid Mohammad Sherzad describes the various ways contemporary Afghan poets were influenced by Sepehri. Sherzad discusses contextual factors, symbolism, naturalism, realism, mysticism, linguistic and structural factors, compound words, and grammatical transgressions.

The last article, Khatere Arbabi and Parvaneh Rahmati Sangkar’s “Ta‘sir-i iztirab-i vujudi bar asar-i Sohrab Sepehri va karburd-i an dar ravandarmani” (The Impact of Existential Anxiety on Sohrab Sepehri’s Works and their Use in Psychotherapy), considers Sepehri’s poetry as a means of assistance in psychotherapy. The authors suggest using Sepheri’s works in dealing with patients with existential anxiety. They also delve into the concepts of loneliness, feelings of nothingness, self-consciousness, insufficient self-control, and death in Sepehri’s poetry.

Each one of these articles is written by a leading scholar in the field, and the editors of this special issue hope that the present volume will help shed light on this influential modern poet-artist. We hope that you enjoy reading these articles as much as we did.

[1] Alana Fletcher, “Toxic Discourse: Waste Heritage as Ghetto Pastoral.” Studies in Canadian Literature 39, no. 2 (2014): 5-21; quote on 7.