Title: Broken Lyres: Epic, Performance, and History in Mehdi Akhavan Sales’ “Akhar-e Shahnameh”

Abstract: In “Akhar-e Shahnameh” by Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1929-1990), one of the foremost representatives of “New Poetry” in Iran, a fictive orality is staged: The poem becomes decipherable only to a reader attuned to the tradition of epic storytelling. This paper examines the relationship between language, perception, self, time, and world created through the fiction of storytelling. Drawing on theories of perception, narrative time, and epic performance, our discussion touches upon the nature of “I” and “we”, the shifting narrative grounds and identities enacted by the narration, the imbrication of past and present in the figure of the storyteller, and the memory spaces that are created both in and through the text. The imaginary speech act of the storyteller casts the reader as audience, while at the same time, the epic past is overlayed by a tumble-down present. Language itself becomes incommensurable with what it describes. Rather than a nostalgic invocation of a lost age of epic heroes, as has often been claimed, “Akhar-e Shahnameh” emerges as the profoundly modern diagnosis of a split consciousness that affects the individual in a society that can no longer return to epic naïveté.

Keywords: Persian poetry, epic poetry, Ferdowsi, modern Iran, storytelling

Author: Marie Huber, Assistant Professor, Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, Stanford University, Palo Alto, State of California, USA.