The Question of the Dates of Nima's Poems

Nima Youshij's position as the father of modern Persian poetry is widely recognized nowadays, but in the past decades, there have been long debates on the issue of the modernization of Persian poetry and its leadership. One of these controversies concerns the claim that Nima fabricated the dates of his poems. The claim was made during Nima's lifetime and has been raised again in recent years and caused considerable debate. Poets and critics from two opposing fronts have made this cl aim first, those who were more radical than Nima in breaking away from tradition and considered Nima a reformer rather than a revolutionary poet, and secondly those who considered Nima too radical and were in favor of a more conservative or moderate type of modernism. In this article, we examine the history of this controversy and assess the robustness of the evidence presented to support it. Through this analysis, an intriguing observation is made concerning the dating of Nima's poems. It is revealed that Nima sometimes initially composed his poems in prose, dating them at the end, and subsequently transformed them into verse while retaining the original date. This practice has likely led some researchers to suspect Nima of falsifying the date of the poem “Qorab” (The Raven). Ultimately, the article concludes that the allegations of fabrication in the dating of Nima's poems do not have substantial implications for the history of modern Persian poetry.