Amir Soltan Mohammadi; Mansoor Sadat ebrahimi
Abstract
Khaqani is one of the poets of Persian literature whose poems are difficult to read. The difficulty of his poems had subjected them to many distortions in diction (called Tas’hif ...
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Khaqani is one of the poets of Persian literature whose poems are difficult to read. The difficulty of his poems had subjected them to many distortions in diction (called Tas’hif in Persian) with the aim of making them simpler. One of the sources of difficulty in Khaqani’s poetry is his artistry in making use of the characteristics of Persian writing system. This is known as pun or ambiguity of distortion or “Iham-e Tashif” in Persian, a figure of speech in which the audience’s mind is directed toward the second meaning of a word in the poem but that meaning is absent from the line while it only establishes a horizontal connection with one or two other words in the line. This figure of speech creates a difficult semantic situation in the poem. The commentators of the verses have also had problems in correcting and explaining the poems. By carefully consulting different manuscripts and studying the meaning of the poems, one can understand the correct form of the distorted words. Therefore, through a careful examination of some of Khaqani’s poems, the researchers were able to find out that the words “oshtad” and “banat” have been incorrectly changed into the words “ostad” and “nabat” which create some problems in the meaning of the poems, too.
