Literary Arts (Dec 2016)

Study of allegories and proverbs used in Kalim Kashani’s Divan

  • Mohammad Mir,
  • Mahdi Javanbakht

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 4
pp. 223 – 234

Abstract

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Abstract Poet laureate Mirza Aboutaleb Kalim Kashani so called "Kalim's Talebaei" which has been nominated "the second means creator", is one of the famous poets of 11th century. His lineage has been revealed from Hamadan by Hisrorians and they have told that due to his inhabitancy in Kashan, he was known as Kashani. Kalim Kashani was so speech. His total poetry is written about 24000 verses; but, what is remained from him is not more than 6567 verses. He used of various rhetorical elements in his poetry and proverb and allegory are of these elements which are changed into stylistic feature because of many applications of them. The reason can be this that the Hindi style poet tries to reinforce his poetry by using proverb and allegory and apply this to make progress in his poetries which among them, Kalim Kashani has exhibited these literary devices for others in the best way. In this research, we tried to investigate proverb and allegory in Kalim Kashani's Divan poetry (6567 verses) that is done by using descriptive-analytical method. At the first, all of proverbs and allegories were extracted and in the next step, we focused on classifying of these literary devices and showing some examples and their analysis. At the end, the obtained results were shown in a table according to the number of proverb and allegory devices and based on statistical samples. The final results of this research show clearly that Kalim Kashani used from proverb device more than the other one. According to this research, among all 9567 verses of whole Divan, there are 718 verses have proverb and allegory devices. Herein, there can be obtained some results including: 1- Kalim Kashani has applied proverb device in his Divan in the best way. He sometimes has used this device in hemistich and sometimes in the verse; so that, based on our investigation, there is 72.8% of all proverbs in the hemistich and 6.8% of which is in the verse. 2- The poet has applied both proverb and allegory devices in his Divan; so that, among all 718 verses contain these literary devices, there are 32 cases (4.5% of all verses) have both. There is just one case in this Divan that it is used literary device so called proverbs device. 3- The number of used allegory smile is 47 cases (6.5% of all). He also used from allegoric metaphor and this device appropriates 3.6% of all. The notable point is that some rhetoricians classified both allegoric metaphor and allusion in the same class and perhaps, there is a sentence that is mentioned as allegoric metaphor and that sentence be an allusion of verb too. This role caused some disagreement on allegoric metaphor and allusion. 4- Other device that has been applied by Kalim Kashani is the style of equation. According to our survey, this device appropriates 5.6% of all devices. In this work, we focused on this device separately because, although the style of equation is subset of allegory, it is classified in the distinct field from allegory in rhetoric topics. As mentioned information, it can be found that as a famous poet in Hindi style, Kalim Kashani did not abstain using proverb and allegory in his Divan and put these literary devices in his poetries in the best way. The poet has used proverb in his Divan more than allegory and the allegory device has less appearance.

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