Bahman Alaeddin and his Undying Life in the Songs of the Tribe: A Linguistic and Literary Study of Two Bakhtiari Poems

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of two Bakhtiari poems from linguistic and literary perspectives – one by Bahman Alaeddin (šaʋ čārdah ‘Fourteenth Night’) and another one, in praise of Bahman Alaeddin, by Feyzollah Taheri‑Ardali (tā laʋte ġazalxun‑e kon-i bāz be āʋāz ‘As You Open Your Lyrical Lips to the Song’). For this purpose, we first transcribe the two poems in the Bakhtiari orthography proposed by Anonby and Asadi (2018). We then present an English translation as well as an interlinearized Persian translation of these two texts. This is followed by a linguistic analysis of the two poems with a focus on phonological and grammatical structures. Since Bakhtiari is an internally diverse language, our analysis has highlighted the linguistic differences between the two poems. From a literary perspective, we explore salient features such as poetic imagery and analyze stylistic devices in the poems

Keywords

• bahman alaeddin (masoud bakhtiari)
• bakhtiari
• oral literature
• poetry
• linguistic analysis
• literary analysis