Mawlawi and Nali as Symbols of Two Different Styles: A Literary Analysis

Abstract

Literary comparison of two movements, literary traditions or prominent poets, is a ground for recognizing their distinctive or unified themes. Accordingly, in this article, the historical trends of two literary movements of Kurdish poetry have been explored and analyzed. On the one hand, the examples of the repetitive literary features of Goran's classical poetry have been emphasized along with its historical and diachronic development. On the other hand, the capabilities of the classical central Kurdish poetry have been addressed which grew and flourished in the vernacular language and oral culture in a specific period of time, by itself and without any previous literary experience. Mawlawi and Nali, each with their own distinguished literary styles, are considered to be the symbols of both the content and the form of these two literary movements. Comparing their styles, therefore, the present study attempts to show the differences between these two poets’ literary styles and influence on their contemporaries and future poets and also to represent the impact of this difference on Abdullah Goran's reforming literary style and his modernist efforts. This modernist poet abandoned the structure, form, meter, and music of prosaic poetry and the style of expression and literary tradition of Nali, since he considered it as a borrowed phenomenon in Kurdish poetry, and returned to Mawlawi’s form, syllabic meter, eloquence and rhetoric the and the literary tradition of Goran in general, and therefore, brought about the modernization of calssical Sorani Kurdish poetry.

Keywords

• nali
• mawlawi
• stylistics
• kurdish poetry
• goran's return