- Dominic Brookshaw
- McGill University
- "Innovative neoclassicism: detecting the old and the new in the poetry of Simin Behbahani"
Dominic Parviz Brookshaw teaches Persian language as well as medieval and modern Persian literature at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Before moving to McGill, he taught Persian language and medieval Persian literature at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford from 2002 to 2005. He is the Assistant Editor for Iranian Studies and his research interests include medieval Persian and Arabic lyric poetry (in particular ghazal poetry), modern and medieval Persian prose writing, and women in the Qajar period (in particular the daughters of Fath-'Ali Shah Qajar). His recent publications include, "Odes of a poet-princess: the ghazals of Jahan-Malik Khatun", Iran XLIII (2005), 173-195; and, "Palaces, Pavilions and Pleasure-gardens: the context and setting of the medieval majlis", Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 6, no. 2 (July 2003), 199-223. - Abstract Although considered a "modern" poet, unlike most of her contemporaries and close friends (e.g. Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales, Nader Naderpour), Simin Behbahani, has, on the whole, avoided the free verse forms of shi'r-i nu, and has chosen instead to use the most popular classical form of Persian lyric poetry, the ghazal, as the main vehicle for her poetic expression. It is commonly known that Simin Behbahani, especially from the mid-1970s onwards, has used many innovative and revolutionary metric schemes in her ghazals; she is perhaps one of the first Persian poets since the late medieval period to do so with such success. In this paper, however, I will examine how new or traditional the imagery, language and structure of Simin Behbahani's ghazals are. How close is her language to the colloquial, and how much does it draw on the archaic language of medieval Persian poetry? There is a tangible tension between the old and the new in Behbahani's poetry which has yet to be fully explored. For this paper, I will focus my comments on the ghazals published in the 1973 collection Rastakhiz ("Resurrection").
