Nationalism and Prosody in Kurdish Poetry

Abstract

Addressing the impact of political events on changes in metrical feet is a new approach applied in this paper. Hasanpour and Vali’s viewpoints on the history of Kurdish nationalism, the relationship between literary texts and political events, and different types of meter in different languages in the world are used in this research. Prosody in Kurdish poetry includes two types of prosodic and syllabic changing from the former to the latter. This study deals with the Middle Kurmanji dialect in the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan from Nali’s period to the late 1980s. The change of poetic meter from the dominance of prosodic meter to the dominance of syllabic meter in Middle Kurmanji has been regarded as a symptom of changes in Kurdish identity and nationalism. In the author's view, one of the reasons for the changes in meter in Kurdish poetry is the nationalist movement. Therefore, the works of some famous Kurdish poets in the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan are analyzed based on a historical-documentary method and three stages are identified: prosodic, prosodic-syllabic, and syllabic. Changes in the meter in Middle Kurmanji poetry from prosodic to syllabic are simultaneous with the emergence and development of nationalist movements in the Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan in World War II.

Keywords

• nationalism
• free verse
• classic poetry
• meter
• prosodic poetry
• syllabic poetry