Abstract
This article addresses poetic form as a foundation bridging the literary contexts of Arabic and Persian that exists beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. We find the originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ, prosody, used in these two contexts to retool premodern poetic form for the modern era. Questions of form encourage us to think about how modernist poets writing in Persian and Arabic approach their poetry as a craft that emerges not out of engagements with Western literature but rather from a shared poetic past. By tracing formal links across Arabic and Persian, this article argues that paying attention to the premodern tradition of prosodic science they share helps us both to understand the early development of modernist poetry in each language and to avoid explanations informed mostly by literary critical frameworks used to study Western literatures.
Premodern poetic form remains a primary consideration of modern poets writing in Persian and Arabic. The originally Arabic science of ʿarūḍ, prosody, continues to inform formal developments in both contexts. To illuminate how premodern form extends into the modern period, this article takes up two projects initially regarded as extreme breaks with local literary history: the Iranian Nīmā Yūshīj’s (d. 1960)1 modernist poetry, specifically his 1922 long poem Afsānah (Myth or Legend) and his 1938 “free verse” poem Quqnūs (“The Phoenix”), and the Lebanese Unsī al-Ḥājj’s (d. 2014) introduction to his collection of prose poetry Lan (Won’t) from 1960.2 In his 1938 poem Quqnūs, Nīmā refers to the poem as a banā-yi khayālī (“an imaginary edifice”)3 and al-Ḥājj argues that a poem built in “the soil of prose” is nevertheless still an instance of al-bināʾ, or “a deliberate construction” in Huda Fakhreddine’s translation.4 In both these cases, we find two modern poets remaining directly engaged with the norms of a common poetic tradition reaching back all the way to the time before Islam and the ancient Arabic qaṣīda ode.5
This article explores the foundational role of this bināʾ, an originally Arabic term for “building” or “structure,” across the Persian and Arabic poetic contexts. Bināʾ, or banā in Persian, shows up in both Nīmā’s and al-Ḥājj’s projects as they elaborate the relationship between their pioneering work and the shared premodern literary history of the Persian- and Arabic-speaking regions of the world. Mediating between poetry and prose we find the band, a form that has only been tangentially addressed as a probable link between the parallel developments of modern poetic form in both poetries, a possible way that modern Arabic poetry might be recognized in relation to the Persianate. My contention here is that by accounting for this shared formal history, we can better understand the continued interconnection of literary developments within the late Persianate and after, even with the immensely influential role of European literary influence across the world during the modern period.
“Persianate pasts die hard,” Aria Fani and Kevin L. Schwartz declaim as they open their 2022 special issue of Iranian Studies, “Persianate Pasts; National Presents,” which gives us a good picture of what happened in the Persianate world to bring it into its “late” period: the emergence of the nation-state in place of empire and the concomitant development of national literatures being among the primary factors.6 Their special issue focuses our attention on the end of the “Persianate millennium,” as Brian Spooner puts it in the epilogue to Nile Green’s edited volume The Persianate World,7 and it is to this twentieth-century moment of transformation that I direct our consideration in this article with my use of the term late Persianate. I argue that by centering poetic form in our examination of the late Persianate, we avoid several problems, first among them the use of a Eurocentric model for literary analysis, one to which we might be inclined due to the undeniable impact of colonialism and imperialism on the Persianate world during its late period. Engaging poetic form helps here because the history of Arabic prosodic science, ʿarūḍ, requires a mode of investigation that looks to the shared literary pasts of Arabic and Persian rather than a move outward to the Euro-American sphere and back.8
It may at first seem counterintuitive to center ʿarūḍ (pronounced ʿarūż in Persian), the formal rules of the originally Arabic qaṣīda—defined by two hemistichs, a continuous, unchanging meter (any one of sixteen total), and a monorhyme at the end of the first two hemistichs and then of every line9 —to understand formal connections across the late Persianate. However, poetry, poetic form in particular, lies at the core of many deliberations about what constitutes Persianate literature. So, rather than focusing on questions of language, religion, or nation, the three primary considerations scholars have made when attempting to define the Persianate,10 I turn instead to Arabic ʿarūḍ in this article to show how poetic form might also illuminate its limits, and how the Persian reception of ʿarūḍ may have also transformed modern Arabic poetry in turn. While “the Arab Other” has been widely recognized as a “scapegoat” by Persian language reformers who campaigned against “the influence of ‘the difficult language of the Arabs’” as part of an Iranian nationalist program,11 Persian is not frequently recognized as having an influence on Arabic. In this article, I will show one way that it has (with the band) and thus argue that we ought to consider Arabic also in relation to the Persianate, if not as a part of it.
Turning our attention to the forms shared across Arabic and Persian poetry helps us avoid some of the issues scholars have had when defining the Persianate. I explore the formal connections of twentieth-century Persian and Arabic poetry by addressing the move from the premodern standards of the qaṣīda or the related ghazal12 love poem to so-called “free verse” poetry (shiʿr-i āzād in Persian; al-shiʿr al-ḥurr in Arabic)13 across both traditions. Throughout, I direct our attention to the continued role of ʿarūḍ even as poets move away from some of its formal strictures, like the repeating rhythm of the Arabic meters and the monorhyme found at the end of every line. Modern poets writing in both Arabic and Persian innovated on poetic form in the same ways across the two traditions, but little scholarship in English has addressed why.
Following the Islamic conquests of the Sasanian Empire (224–651), Persian poetry went through a major transformation in terms of metrical analysis. As the New Persian language developed out of Middle Persian following its contact with Arabic, the qualitative prosodic understanding of Persian poetry disappeared to be replaced by the quantitative Arabic system described by al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad al-Farāhīdī (d. between 777 and 791), also known as ʿarūḍ. Mary Boyce writes that Middle Persian verse was “governed evidently by stress, without regard for quantity, and the number of unstressed syllables varies from line to line. And there is no rhyme.”14 Although New Persian poetry maintains its qualitative origins in the actual sounds of its prosody, after the Islamic conquests it was analyzed according to the quantitative ʿarūḍ patterns of the Arabs, with necessary additions of new terms to describe the realities of Persian verse. L.P. Elwell-Sutton further explains that there has been
serious confusion among prosodists, both ancient and modern, as to the true source and nature of the Persian meters, the most obvious error being the assumption that they were copied from the Arabic. This misconception arises solely from the use of the Arabic terminology to describe the Persian meters, but is no sounder evidence for an Arabic origin than is, say, the use of Greek terminology proof of a Greek origin for the meters of English verse.15
Finn Thiesen likewise speculates that
[a] comparison of the prosodical and phonological systems of the two languages could probably settle the controversy as to whether Persian prosody is derived from Arabic prosody or, as I am inclined to think, it was only the Arabic terminology that was adapted to a basically native Persian system.16
While the sonic foundations of Arabic and Persian poetry are almost certainly unrelated due to being in different language families—and I am here in agreement with L.P. Elwell-Sutton’s argument that the Arabic meters are essentially alien to Persian poetry and that the ʿarūḍ system is an external imposition17 —I think it would also be quite difficult to prove that there has been no change to how Persian poets have thought about meter following the importation of the Arabic ʿarūḍ system into Persian metrical analysis more than a millennium ago. Amr Taher Ahmed has recently argued along this line, showing that premodern Persian poets’ predilection for eightfold meters (that is, lines with eight feet each) “was inspired by the structure of the Arabic eightfold base meters” and that “Arabic prosody was indeed the dominant factor in shaping Persian eightfold meters.”18 Clearly, many features of Arabic form, like rhyme placement19 and the number of feet per line in a particular meter, have affected the shape of poetry in Persian.20
I find it appropriate to begin our investigation of the interconnection of modern formal developments in Arabic and Persian poetry with Nīmā Yūshīj’s 1922 long poem Afsānah as I write now on the one-hundred-year anniversary of its composition. Afsānah presents us with an interesting commentary on form and poetry in Persian because, in Firoozeh Papan-Matin’s reading, it “could be read as a meta-poem, bringing to light the ambivalences, paradoxes and uncertainties that point toward Nima’s affinities with and distinctions from the masters of classical Persian poetry.”21 Papan-Matin approaches Afsānah as a meta-poem by reading it alongside the introduction Nīmā wrote for it, in which, “while intentionally trying to dislodge poetry from certain of its classical attributes, Nima is, at the same time, reaching out for relations with the Persian poetic tradition—particularly the dramatic ghazal.”22 The text of the poem likewise gestures to this dialogue between past and present as Nīmā presents his long “dramatic ghazal,” much longer than a standard ghazal poem, in the mutadārik “tripping” meter, completely acceptable within the ʿarūḍ system of the qaṣīda,23 from which the ghazal form was likely derived.24
While Nīmā’s innovations in content within the poem herald the modern perspective he intended to bring to Persian poetry, his introduction, recently translated in full by Bahareh Azad, shows the central role of poetic form in his poetic practice. After addressing a “young poet” (“Ay shāʿir-i javān!”) in the first line, Nīmā begins the introduction, “The structure (sākhtimān) that my work, Afsaneh, accommodates, representing an unrestrained and natural conversation, may not appeal to you at first, and you might not be as pleased with it as I am.”25 While Nīmā marks a generational divide by calling out to a “young poet” and distinguishing his “long ghazal” from the “ghazal-i qudamā,” or the “ghazal of the ancients,”26 he stays focused on the formal features of the poem, its sākhtimān.
Sākhtimān means many things, among them building, construction, frame, and structure, and Nīmā’s insistence on explaining his “new” poetry (in the sense of shiʿr-i naw) in terms of its form remains on display throughout the introduction to Afsānah as the word is repeated seven times in as many paragraphs. While Nīmā’s new poetic method introduces “drama” (namāyish) to the ghazal form, he continues a close formal dialogue with the broader tradition of the qaṣīda, further describing Afsānah in terms of other forms, both past and current, when he writes that “its structure (sākhtimān) is sufficiently capacious to accommodate whatever you put in it (description [vaṣf], novel [rumān], requiem [taʿziyah], farce [mażḥakah], etc.).”27 Alongside the French term for the novel (roman), the farce (mażḥakah), and the Shiʿi taʿziyah Passion Play remembering the death of ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn (d. 680), Nīmā also includes the Arabic poetic genre of waṣf (description). I believe we should read Nīmā’s “capacious” understanding of his new poetry’s formal ability to “accommodate” these disparate genres as an attempt to renew Persian poetry that not only invites the development of novel forms but also pays close attention to the persistence of formal poetic features like rhyme and meter.
Nīmā’s modern poetic practice and meta-commentary on Persian poetics finds its fullest expression in the poems he wrote in 1938, first among them “The Phoenix.” In “The Phoenix,” Nīmā again employs a meter found within the Arabic ʿarūḍ system, the muḍāriʿ, “similar” meter.28 The muḍāriʿ was not at all common in premodern Arabic poetry, along with other meters that do exist within al-Khalīl’s ʿarūḍ system but hardly show up, such as the hazaj, “trilling” meter, the ramal, “running” meter, or the madīd, “extended” meter, among others, each of which represents less than one percent of the poems across two major corpora.29 Yet it is no surprise that Nīmā would choose the muḍāriʿ for a poem in Persian, where similar analysis reveals the premodern Persian poets’ preference for this meter, alongside the hazaj and the ramal, coming in at 15.7%, 22.1%, and 27.5%, respectively, of the 20,114 poems Elwell-Sutton includes in his corpus.30 (The madīd only shows up in a single poem, thus showing it to be exceedingly rare across the two traditions.) Because there is no space for a metrical analysis of Nīmā’s entire poem here, I prefer to focus on the meta-poetic proclamation “The Phoenix” makes in its first lines, which include a single line that breaks with the muḍāriʿ meter.31 The poem opens with the Phoenix sitting alone on a branch with other birds crowding around, much like a poet at a recitation. In the second stanza,
Nīmā’s poetic persona invokes the language of building and construction in the final line with the verb mīsāzad, which is derivationally related to the noun sākhtimān. Nīmā’s Phoenix, a stand-in for the poet, “builds” “the wall of an imaginary edifice” from “the tattered shreds of a thousand different voices,” that is, from the many voices of the past that it summons to mind as it composes. “Imaginary edifice” is my translation of the Persian banā-yi khayāli. Banā comes from the Arabic bināʾ, yet another term used for a building or a structure, and one that we likewise find used in similar literary critical analyses of the relationship between modern poetry and what came before it in Arabic. While the content clearly offers Nīmā’s meta-perspective on how the poet creates a new poem out of what came before, he also plays with the metrics in the final two lines, which in Persian end with a series of five long syllables in a row: “yālī / mīsāzad.” This stands out as the only point in the entire poem where the meter breaks down and in so doing limns the distinction between the content (in which the Phoenix “builds” the poem) and the form (which breaks with metrical convention).33 This tension between form and content represents a continuation of the critical poetic project Nīmā began in the introduction to Afsānah. With this project, Nīmā challenges the powerful influence of the premodern ʿarūḍ on modern poetry in Persian yet pays homage to its important role in his development of “new poetry.” He simultaneously admits that the poem is an “imaginary edifice” and a banā made up of formal elements like meter and rhyme while exploring the limits of prosody and even exceeding them.
Another clear break Nīmā makes with formal requirements is varying the number of feet per line throughout the poem. Supra we have lines of four, four, four, three, and one foot. Compare Nīmā’s technique with the following, a form called the “band,” written in Arabic by Ibn al-Khilfa (d. 1831),34 and cited by Nāzik al-Malāʾika (d. 2007) in her groundbreaking critical work Qaḍāyā al-shiʿr al-muʿāṣir (Issues in Contemporary Poetry), which she first gives in paragraph form, as if in prose, like this:
أهل تعلم ام لا أن للحب لذاذات؟ وقد يعذر لا يعذل من فيه غراماً وجوى مات فذا مذهبُ أربابِ الكلمات فدع عنك من اللوم زخاريف المقالات فكم قد هذّب الحبّ بليدا فغدا في مسلك الآداب والفضل رشيدا […].
Then she organizes it with lines marked by end rhymes—end rhymes that vary, unlike in the traditional qaṣīda. Here is al-Malāʾika’s reordering of the band into lines of poetry, followed by my translation, which at least gives a sense of the content if not the rhyme (an AAAABB scheme) or meter:
The lines contain a reflection on love, but the theme is irrelevant to our (and al-Malāʾika’s) immediate interest. Rather, the form shows a link between a poem like Nīmā’s “The Phoenix” in Persian and the Arabic “free verse” al-Malāʾika pioneered. Consider the number of feet per line, which al-Malāʾika gives in her analysis: four, five, three, four, three, and four.36 (Even without knowing Arabic, you can see the difference in the lengths of the lines.) As with premodern Persian poetry, such variations of the number of feet from one line to another were unheard of in Arabic poetry, except in the band, until “free verse” emerged in the twentieth century.
Scholars have argued about the origins and genre classification of the band, with some placing bands between poetry and prose, others arguing that they are too unpoetic to be classified as poetry, and yet others suggesting that the formal features of the band birthed Arabic “free verse.”37 ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Dujaylī, who produced the most thorough study of the band in Arabic, follows the Iraqi poet Jamīl Ṣidqī al-Zahāwī (d. 1936) who believed that the band is “the link between poetry and prose” (“huwa al-ḥalqa al-wusṭā bayna al-naẓm wa-l-nathr”).38 Yet ever since Salma Khadra Jayyusi (d. 2023) wrote off the importance of the band in her 1977 Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, there have been few attempts to analyze it as a likely source for formal developments in modern Arabic poetry. Jayyusi hesitates to treat bands seriously because she finds them “prosaic” and “conversational” in terms of theme, unoriginal, and “banal,” with “a complete lack of that emotional tension which is the first attribute of poetry.”39 Countering al-Dujaylī’s argument “that these bands represent an attempt to liberate the two meters used in them [hazaj and ramal] from the pre-determined number of feet in the traditional verse,” she argues that “such a desire and need for liberation can only take hold of poets in an age of artistic rebellion where the creative energy is active and genuine.”40 I agree instead with al-Malāʾika, who recognizes the formal connection between the band and “free verse” poetry in Issues in Contemporary Poetry, where she writes, “There is no doubt that al-shiʿr al-ḥurr (‘free verse’) is closer in terms of its metrics to the band than it is to the two-hemistich style [of the qaṣīda], and that is because each of them depends on the basis of the tafʿīla foot rather than the hemistich.”41 Relevant to our discussion is the similarity between not only the band form and Arabic “free verse” but also with Nīmā’s “new poetry.” Earlier, we saw Nīmā using the muḍāriʿ meter more often found in premodern Persian poetry than in Arabic to make his metrical intervention in “The Phoenix,” and here we find the Iraqi band poets employing the hazaj and ramal meters not commonly attested in premodern Arabic poetry but often used in Persian. The band is in all likelihood the link between the two traditions, as it ushers in the possibility of writing Arabic “free verse” in meters uncommon to Arabic but frequent in Persian such as not only the ramal and hazaj, but also the mutadārik (which Nīmā used in Afsānah and which was a favorite of the early Arabic modernists like Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb [d. 1964] and al-Malāʾika herself42 ), the khafīf, “light” meter, and the less-common but still relevant mujtathth, “amputated” meter.43
Alongside this issue of metrical frequencies between Persian and Arabic, the band, “free verse” in Arabic, and Persian “new poetry” all retain the metrical foot (al-tafʿīla) as the basis of their bināʾ structure. The Iranian critic Muḥammad Riżā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī likewise traces the connection of Persian and Arabic poetry through the band with a thorough treatment in his Mūsīqī-yi shiʿr (The Music of Poetry), where he tells us that the band, known in Persian as “the long Persian meter” (baḥr-i ṭavīl-i fārsī), is “an attempt to escape the limited metrical foot combinations of the ʿārūḍ that Iranians have pioneered and has found its way from the poets of Iran into the Arabic language also.”44 Leaving aside considerations of genre, three things about the band are clear: it retains rhyme (but not a monorhyme), it is metered, and it “emerged and spread initially in southern Iraq and its geographical extensions to the east and south.”45 Ibrahim, al-Dujaylī, al-Malāʾika, and myself are all in agreement, to one extent or another, that the band developed in southern Iraq due to cultural and linguistic mixing between Persian and Arabic speakers there.
If we consider only a few lines of Arabic “free verse,” we can see the links between Nīmā’s formal innovations, the band, and modern Arabic poetry. Take, for example, an early attempt at “free verse” by al-Sayyāb, a poet hailing from a small village outside Basra in southern Iraq called Jaykūr that sits only a mile or two from the modern border with Iran. Al-Sayyāb composed this poem, titled “Hal kāna ḥubban?” (“Was It Love?”), on 29 November 1946. It opens,
Comparing these lines to those of Ibn al-Khilfa’s band and Nīmā’s poem, we find a similar form across all three. Al-Sayyāb’s lines have varied numbers of feet (three feet to each of the first three; four feet to lines four and five) and an end rhyme that changes (mīm in the first three lines, and qāf in four and five). If we compare it only with Ibn al-Khilfa’s much older band, al-Sayyāb’s poem matches yet more directly with that band’s love theme. Furthermore, al-Sayyāb employs the ramal meter whereas Ibn al-Khilfa uses the hazaj, the only two Arabic meters al-Malāʾika says can be used in bands47 and which were much more common in premodern Persian poetry than in Arabic, yet another indication of the band’s likely origin in Persian before its adoption by Arab poets. Although al-Malāʾika does not mention al-Sayyāb’s poem specifically as a bridge from bands to Arabic “free verse,” “Was It Love?” distinctly shows the formal connections between the two, if not their thematic links as well.
The pioneers of modern Arabic poetry found themselves in a situation paralleling Nīmā’s with regard to the immense influence of premodern ʿarūḍ strictures, which continued to determine the types of innovations these poets attempted to make. Modern poets writing in Arabic followed a path nearly parallel to Nīmā’s, along which they carefully went about retaining meter but lengthening and shortening hemistichs into separate poetic lines in accordance with the content they wished to express in each one. As in the new Persian poetry, the transitional form of the band, and in “free verse” Arabic poetry, this amounts to changing the total number of feet in each line of a poem, which is the major innovation modern poets introduced, along with giving up on the monorhyme. “Free verse” style remains the main area for experimentation in Arabic poetry today, other than the prose poem, which gives up even the meter.
The Arabic prose poem has enjoyed somewhat more robust critical engagements than the prose poem in Persian, though—as with the band—the phenomenon remains understudied. Following al-Malāʾika’s suggestion that the prose poem’s form might be compared with features of the band,48 I think that focusing on the prose poem’s relationship with earlier poetry in Persian and Arabic can help us better understand it as a novel poetic form but also the formal foundations that are shared across both contexts when poets go about composing prose poetry.
In her new book, The Arabic Prose Poem, Huda Fakhreddine discusses two key prose poem manifestos, both from 1960. (This year is also of interest to us because Nīmā died then.) The first is Syro-Lebanese poet Adūnīs’s (b. 1930) essay “Fī qaṣīdat al-nathr” (“On the Prose Poem”), published in the journal Shiʿr (Poetry).49 The second, which will be our focus here, is Unsī al-Ḥājj’s introduction to Lan, where he writes,
The poem (al-qaṣīda) is more demanding of itself than poetry (al-shiʿr) is of itself. The poem, in order to become like this, is necessarily built on elements of poetry, not because these are sufficient for [the poem] but rather to reconsider them in terms of brevity, refinement, and how well they are bound together. The poem, not poetry, is the poet (al-qaṣīda, lā al-shiʿr, hiya al-shāʿir). The poem, not poetry, is the world a poet strives to construct with his poetry. There might be a collection of excellent poetry without two poems in it—it might instead be a single poem. It is not poetry but the poem, that complete, self-sufficient, and independent world, which is the difficult one to construct (hiya al-ṣaʿba al-bināʾ) in the open, extending, and flowing soil of prose.50
Like we found with Nīmā, al-Ḥājj remains focused on form as he imagines what a prose poem might be in Arabic. For al-Ḥājj, it is the qaṣīda (poem), and not shiʿr (poetry) that the poet deals with; the qaṣīda is what the poet attempts to build—whether in poetry or in prose, in the case of the prose poets—and which also fashions the poet as a poet. Al-Ḥajj further directs our critical attention away from poetry and toward the poem by describing it as a “complete, self-sufficient, and independent world” that is “the difficult one to construct in the open, extending, and flowing soil of prose.” Here again, the poem as a type of bināʾ, a “deliberate construction” in Fakhreddine’s translation, lies at the center of al-Ḥājj’s analysis, even when approaching the extreme limits of poetry that the prose poem tests. As Fakhreddine puts it elsewhere, “[t]he prose poem, thus, becomes the site where the poetic is interrogated.”51 The prose poem in Arabic must be measured in terms of its relationship with the qaṣīda as it developed within the tradition and is therefore in “dialogue with other texts and a poetic interpretation of borrowed moments and themes.”52 Form, in the ever-present shape of ʿarūḍ rules, maintains its place as an organizing structure for poets writing in Arabic, even once they have “jumped the fence of meter” into the “flowing soil of prose.”53
Fakhreddine, following al-Ḥājj’s lead, likewise centers bināʾ as a prominent part of her analysis. “In his insistence on the term ‘bināʾ’,” Fakhreddine further explains,
Unsi al-Hajj, like Baudelaire, is dreaming of the miraculous, of freedom with exactitude, of subjectivity with a plan. He too seems to believe that without precision and predetermination, the prose poem becomes a contradiction instead of a balance and simply disintegrates.54
For Fakhreddine, the prose poem represents the latest “variation on” and “expansion of the pre-modern definition of poetry ‘as metered and rhymed speech.’”55 Further, she argues that “[s]tructure (bināʾ), on the level of both the parts (the phrase or the sentence) and the whole, takes precedence over form as meter and rhyme.”56 Overall, the prose poem in Fakhreddine’s analysis
allows for a new conception of form that does not exist outside the poem but grows from inside of it. It invites us as critics and readers of Arabic poetry to revisit our understanding of structure in poetry (bināʾ) and use that to arrive at form. This has the potential of redefining poetic forms that have been cast as rigid and fixed.57
Although the prose poem “jumps the fence of meter” and thereby challenges our critical apparatus for understanding poetry only as “metered and rhymed speech,” it necessarily cannot escape the bounds of bināʾ. The prose poem retains a structure at its base, in the same way modern experiments in Arabic and Persian poetry reimagined premodern prosodic forms to better express poetic content. As Fakhreddine shows throughout her study, the prose poets writing in Arabic remain in a dialogue with premodern ʿarūḍ prosodic rules even as they shrug off meter and rhyme.
Turning our attention to this continued presence of premodern form as the starting point for modern poetry in Arabic and Persian and their shared structures helps us better understand how poets writing in Persian and Arabic have kept up a dialog with their poetic traditions. It also helps us counter the Eurocentrism often found in contemporary treatments of world literature. Poets and critics use form across both contexts to elaborate how premodern poetic standards might be retooled for the modern era beyond the bounds of Euro-American influence. By tracing bināʾ across Persian and Arabic in the formal developments that emerged out of the innovations found in the band and the movement of Persian metrical preferences within the Arabic ʿarūḍ system into modern Arabic poetry, we can think about the late Persianate without privileging Western literature and criticism. Turning to form both subverts Eurocentric critical models tracing the development of modern poetry in other parts of the globe too often in the shadow of the West and sidesteps some of the problems we face when defining what exactly the Persianate is, e.g., this term’s connection with Iranian nationalist discourse, Islamic particularism, or even the Persian language itself. The formal elements of ʿarūḍ, prosodic science, are not limited to any of these, instead flowing from one cultural context to another within or adjacent to the Persianate and from the premodern period into the modern era, bounded only by the artistic capacities and imaginations of the poets who create themselves through their engagements of and disengagements with form.
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Fakhreddine, Huda J. The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Fani, Aria. “A Silent Conversation with Literary History: Re-theorizing Modernism in the Poetry of Bizhan Jalāli.” Iranian Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 523–552.
Fani, Aria and Kevin L. Schwartz. “Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century.” Iranian Studies 55, no. 3 (2022): 605–609.
Feuillebois, Ève. “Ghazal in Persian.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrün Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27440. Accessed April 2, 2023.
Fragner, Bert G. Die “Persophonie”: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in der Geschichte Asiens. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999.
Golston, Chris and Tomas Riad. “The Phonology of Classical Arabic Meter.” Linguistics 35 (1997): 111–132.
Green, Nile, ed. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland [CA]: University of California Press, 2019.
Ḥājj, Unsī al-. Lan. Second edition. Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-Jāmiʿiyya li-l-Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1962 [1960].
Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā. Fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī. Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1926.
Ibn Jaʿfar al-Kātib al-Baghdādī, Qudāma. Kitāb naqd al-shiʿr. Edited by Seeger Adrianus Bonebakker. Trustees of the de Goeje Fund 17. Leiden: Brill, 1956.
Jabbari, Alexander. “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 418–434.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry. Studies in Arabic Literature: Supplements to the Journal of Arabic Literature. Vol. 6, 24 vols. Edited by M.M. Badawi, P. Cachia, M.C. Lyons, J.N. Mattock, and J.T. Monroe. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977.
Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad and Kamran Talattof, eds. Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004.
Kia, Mana. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Krenkow, F., G. Lecomte, C.-H. de Fouchécour, Abdülkadir Karahan, and R. Russell. “Ḳaṣīda.” In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0461. Accessed April 2, 2023.
Malāʾika, Nāzik al-. Qaḍāyā al-shiʿr al-muʿāṣir. Baghdad: Manshūrāt Maktabat al-Nahḍa, 1967 [1962].
Malāʾika, Nāzik al-. Revolt Against the Sun: The Selected Poetry of Nāzik al-Malāʾikah. A Bilingual Reader. Edited and translated by Emily Drumsta. London: Saqi Books, 2020.
Moody, Alys and Stephen J. Ross, eds. Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Philsooph, Hushang. “Book Review: Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry.” Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 1 (April 2009): 100–105.
Pue, A. Sean. I Too Have Some Dreams: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry. Oakland [CA]: University of California Press, 2014.
Sayyāb, Badr Shākir al-. Al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya al-kāmila. Fourth edition. Baghdad: Dār al-Ḥurriyya li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2008.
Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Muḥammad Riżā. Musīqī-yi shiʿr. Second edition. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Āgāh, 1368 [1989].
Spooner, Brian and William L. Hanaway, eds. Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012.
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamed. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Thiesen, Finn. A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody: with Chapters on Urdu, Karakhanidic and Ottoman Prosody. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982.
Thompson, Levi. “Re-Orienting Modernism: Mapping East-East Exchanges between Arabic and Persian Poetry.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Mapping New Directions in the Humanities, 40 (2020): 115–138.
Wright, W. A Grammar of the Arabic Language. Revised by W. Robertson Smith and M.J. de Goeje. 2 vols. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, Pvt. Ltd, 2004 [1862].
Yaḥyāwī, Rāwiyya. Shiʿr Adūnīs: al-binya wa-l-dalāla. Damascus: Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb al-ʿArab, 2008.
Yūshīj, Nīmā. Majmūʿah-i kāmil-i ashʿār-i Nīmā Yūshīj: Fārsī va Ṭabarī. Tehran: Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1370 [1991].
Nīmā Yūshīj is the pen name of ʿAlī Isfandiyārī. On Nīmā’s biography, see Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Nima Yushij: A Life,” Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry, ed. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Kamran Talattof (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004), 11–68.
Unsī al-Ḥājj, Lan, 2nd edition (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-Jāmiʿiyya li-l-Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1962 [1960]).
Nīmā Yūshīj, Majmūʿah-i kāmil-i ashʿār-i Nīmā Yūshīj: Fārsī va Ṭabarī (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Nigāh, 1370 [1991]), 224–25.
Huda J. Fakhreddine, The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 16. Al-Ḥājj, Lan, 10.
Scholars in the twentieth century debated the origins of the qaṣīda, with some suggesting that the orally preserved texts of the earliest examples available to us (the Muʿallaqāt) show significant evidence of later fabrication in the period following the emergence of Islam during the early seventh century. See Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Fī al-shiʿr al-jāhilī (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣriyya, 1926) and Hussam R. Ahmed’s discussion of the controversy surrounding the book in The Last Nahdawi: Taha Hussein and Institution Building in Egypt (Stanford, [CA]: Stanford University Press, 2021), 14. For a definition of the qaṣīda and a discussion of it as a form shared across Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu as well as some of its features in each linguistic context, see F. Krenkow, G. Lecomte, C.-H. de Fouchécour, Abdülkadir Karahan, and R. Russell, “Ḳaṣīda,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition [EI2], ed. P. Bearman et al., http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0461, accessed April 2, 2023.
Aria Fani and Kevin L. Schwartz, “Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century,” Iranian Studies 55, no. 3 (2022): 605.
“Epilogue: The Persianate Millennium,” The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, ed. Nile Green (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 301–16, see especially 313.
Other scholars working in a similar mode in the fields of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu literatures include but are not limited to Aria Fani, Alexander Jabbari, and A. Sean Pue, who have begun to make serious inroads for bringing literary developments in the Middle East, broadly conceived, into discussions about modernism and modernity as global phenomena. See Aria Fani, “A Silent Conversation with Literary History: Re-theorizing Modernism in the Poetry of Bizhan Jalāli,” Iranian Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 523–52; Alexander Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 418–34; and A. Sean Pue, I Too Have Some Dreams: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry (Oakland [CA]: University of California Press, 2014).
On Arabic metrics, see G. Weil and G.M. Meredith-Owens, “ʿArūḍ,” EI2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0066, accessed April 2, 2023.
Compare treatments of the Persianate in Nile Green, “Introduction: The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900),” in The Persianate World, 1–71; Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Hamid Dabashi, The World of Persian Literary Humanism (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2012); Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order, ed. Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012); and Bert G. Fragner, Die “Persophonie”: Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in der Geschichte Asiens (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1999). Green cites Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s coining of the term in The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 2: 293.
Mohamed Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 104.
Many scholars argue that the ghazal comes from the Arabic qaṣīda. Although the formal features of the ghazal match those of the qaṣīda (its rhyme pattern and metrical qualities), it is shorter, perhaps “originat[ing] in the erotic nasīb of the qaṣīdah,” Ève Feuillebois explains, adding that some scholarship suggests a split between the ghazal as “a specific poetic form” and a “‘generic’ ghazal, being a genre characterized by the theme of love and having its roots in indigenous [i.e., Persian] popular poetry.” She continues to say that “[m]ore probably, the interactions between Arabic and Persian literatures were mutual” in the development of the ghazal over time—a position I find most plausible. Ève Feuillebois, “Ghazal in Persian,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition, ed. Kate Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_27440, accessed April 2, 2023.
“Free verse” in Persian is sometimes also called “shiʿr-i Nīmāʾī” (Nimaic poetry) or simply “shiʿr-i naw” (new poetry). Both Arabic and Persian “free verse” retain meter and are therefore distinct from English notions of free verse. Hence, I use quotation marks whenever I mention the term in this article.
Mary Boyce, “The Parthian ‘Gōsān’ and Iranian Minstrel Tradition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 1/2 (April 1957): 40.
L. P. Elwell-Sutton, “ʿArūż,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, II/6–7, 670–79, available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/aruz-the-metrical-system, accessed April 2, 2023.
Finn Thiesen, A Manual of Classical Persian Prosody: with Chapters on Urdu, Karakhanidic and Ottoman Prosody (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1982), XIV–XV. Italics original.
L. P. Elwell-Sutton, The Persian Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). To be clear, because it is a science intended to describe natural phenomena, we might even say that al-Khalīl’s system is an imposition on Arabic poetry as well.
Amr Taher Ahmed, “A Theory of Reduplication: Eightfold Meters in Classical Persian Poetry,” Iranian Studies 50, no. 3 (2017): 393 and 407.
With regard to rhyme, even Elwell-Sutton is inclined to note that “[i]t has hitherto been widely asserted that rhyme, like the meters of Persian verse, was copied from the Arabs. The case is certainly stronger where rhyme is concerned, since it appears to be the exception rather than the rule in Middle Persian verse.” Elwell-Sutton, Persian Metres, 223.
While there is no space for an extended digression into the shared tradition of adab—i.e., “proper aesthetic and ethical form” (Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020], 295)—across the Arabic and Persian contexts, I should mention that knowledge of Arabic ʿarūḍ was an essential skill at Persian-speaking courts in Central Asia and Iran, as evidenced by the pen name of the author of the Four Discourses (Chahār Maqālah), a training guide for aspiring bureaucrats, Niẓāmī ʿArūżī (d. 1161). Shahzad Bashir, The Market in Poetry in the Persian World, Elements in the Global Middle Ages Series, ed. Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 18.
Firoozeh Papan-Matin, “Love: Nima’s Dialogue with Hafez,” Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry, ed. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak and Kamran Talottof (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 175.
Papan-Matin, “Love,” 174.
On this meter’s use in Afsānah, see Thiesen, Manual, 243 and Hushang Philsooph, “Book Review: Essays on Nima Yushij: Animating Modernism in Persian Poetry,” Middle Eastern Literatures 12, no. 1 (April 2009): 103. For more on the mutadārik meter in Arabic, see W. Wright, A Grammar of the Arabic Language, rev. W. Robertson Smith and M.J. de Goeje, vol. 2 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, Pvt. Ltd, 2004 [1862]), 365.
Feuillebois, “Ghazal in Persian,” and R. Blanchère and A. Bausani, “G͟h͟azal,” EI2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0232, accessed April 2, 2023.
The original introduction can be found in Persian in Yūshīj, Majmūʿah, 37–38. The translation is Nima Yushij, “I. Preface to The Myth,” Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Alys Moody and Stephen J. Ross (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020): 213–14. Parentheses added.
Azad translates this as “classical ghazal,” but because Nīmā is making a stark division between his new poetry and what preceded it, I prefer to retain the sense of “coming before” that the qāf—dāl—mīm root carries with it.
Yushij, “I. Preface to The Myth,” 213. First parentheses and brackets added. The original is Yūshīj, Majmūʿah, 3.
See Wright, Grammar, vol. 2, 364–365.
For an overview of all metrical frequencies in premodern Arabic poetry, see Chris Golston and Tomas Riad, “The Phonology of Classical Arabic Meter,” Linguistics 35 (1997): 120.
Ahmed offers a welcome distillation of Elwell-Sutton’s data with a chart found in “Theory,” 392. For the original, see Elwell-Sutton, Persian Metres, 145–167.
For full metrical analyses in French and English, see Amr Taher Ahmed, La « Révolution littéraire »: Étude de l’influence de la poésie française sur la modernisation des formes poétiques persanes au début de XXe siècle (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2012), 423–27 and Levi Thompson, “Re-Orienting Modernism: Mapping East-East Exchanges between Arabic and Persian Poetry,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Mapping New Directions in the Humanities, 40 (2020): 123–24.
Yūshīj, Majmūʿah, 222. My translation.
Because I think that Nīmā consciously breaks with the meter here, my reading of this poem departs from Elwell-Sutton’s, where he argues,
Since no one would suggest that these [“free verse”] poets are bound by tradition in retaining this feature [i.e., premodern metrics], we can only conclude that the patterns are so natural to Persian speech that it is hard even for a revolutionary poet to abandon them.
Elwell-Sutton, The Persian Meters, 188. I rather believe that Nīmā knows exactly what he is doing with regard to the prosodic tradition.
For more on Ibn al-Khilfa’s bands, see ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Dujaylī, al-Band fī al-adab al-ʿarabī: tārīkhuh wa-nuṣūṣuh (Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif, 1378/1959), 67–70. Al-Dujaylī suggests “Ibn al-Khalfa” in place of “al-Khilfa,” given by ʿAbdallah Ibrahim, “The Role of the Pre-Modern: The Generic Characteristics of the Band,” in Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period, ed. Roger Allen and D.S. Richards, Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [2006]), 90, 97.
Nāzik al-Malāʾika, Qaḍāyā al-shiʿr al-muʿāṣir (Baghdad: Manshūrāt Maktabat al-Nahḍa, 1967 [1962]), 170.
Al-Malāʾika, Qaḍāyā, 170.
For a good overview of these debates and suggested definitions of the term band, which all agree is clearly a loan word from Persian, see Ibrahim, “Role,” 87–98.
Al-Dujaylī, al-Band, yāʾ.
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, Studies in Arabic Literature: Supplements to the Journal of Arabic Literature, vol. 6, ed. M.M. Badawi et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 553–54.
Jayyusi, Trends, 555.
Al-Malāʾika, Qaḍāyā, 180. Brackets added.
E.g., al-Malāʾika uses the mutadārik in her first “free verse” poem, “al-Kūlīrā” (“Cholera”). For more on this poem’s place in the history of Arabic “free verse,” see Nāzik al-Malāʾika, Revolt Against the Sun: The Selected Poetry of Nāzik al-Malāʾikah. A Bilingual Reader, ed. and trans. Emily Drumsta (London: Saqi Books, 2020), xii, xxxiv, and 54–55.
Golston and Riad, “Phonology,” 120; Ahmed, “Theory,” 392; and, for the sake of charting how at least one modern Arabic poet, Adūnīs, incorporated these nearly non-existent premodern meters into his verse over time, Rāwiyya Yaḥyāwī, Shiʿr Adūnīs: al-binya wa-l-dalāla (Damascus: Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb al-ʿArab, 2008), 277.
Muḥammad Riżā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, Musīqī-yi shiʿr, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Intishārāt-i Āgāh, 1368 [1989]), 507. He even offers corrections to al-Dujaylī’s and al-Malāʾika’s scansions of a band to show how its metrics can work without resorting to contortions of ʿarūḍ on p. 514. The “ṭavīl” used here “has nothing whatever to do with the Arabic metre of the same name,” the ṭawīl. Elwell-Sutton, Persian Metres, 192.
Ibrahim, “Role,” 87. On the band’s origins in Iraq, see Maḥmūd al-ʿAbṭa, “al-Band fī al-adab al-ʿirāqī,” al-Risāla 933 (21 May 1951): 575–77.
Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya al-kāmila, 4th ed. (Baghdad: Dār al-Ḥurriyya li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-nashr, 2008), 81.
Cf. Ibrahim, “Role,” 91 and al-Malāʾika, Qaḍāyā, 177.
Although al-Malāʾika denigrates the prose poem in Arabic as a “bidʿa gharība” (“a strange innovation”), she still makes this important connection in her analysis. Al-Malāʾika, Qaḍāyā, 182, 169.
Adūnīs, “Fī qaṣīdat al-nathr,” Shiʿr 14 (1960): 75–83. On the group of poets and critics associated with the journal and their role in the development of Arabic modernism, see Robyn Creswell, City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Al-Ḥājj, Lan, 10. Fakhreddine translates some of this paragraph, and I have based my longer translation here on hers. See Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 16.
Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 34.
Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 257.
Fakhreddine employs this phrase throughout her investigation. “Once the Arabic prose poem jumped the fence of meter, it exposed itself to pressing and fundamental questions about the very game of poetry, its possibilities and the new parameters of the playing field.” Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 2.
Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 17.
Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 17. Fakhreddine cites part of Qudāma ibn Jaʿfar’s well-known early definition of poetry in Arabic, which in full goes “qawl mawzūn muqaffā yadullu ʿalā maʿnan” (“metered, rhymed speech that has meaning”). Qudāma ibn Jaʿfar al-Kātib al-Baghdādī, Kitāb naqd al-shiʿr, ed. Seeger Adrianus Bonebakker, Trustees of the de Goeje Fund 17 (Leiden: Brill, 1956), 2.
Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 44. Parentheses original.
Fakhreddine, Arabic Prose Poem, 254. Parentheses original.