A Lacanian Reading of Sohrab Sepehri's "The Primeval Call" ("Neday-e-Aghaz")

Sohrab Sepehri (1307-1359), the Iranian poet and painter collected his poems in a book entitled Eight Books. His view towards God, nature, good and evil, fair and foul has attracted the attention of critics. "The Green Space" and "Us Nil, Us a Look", the two last volumes of Eight Books, are more important since, in the development of his poetic process, they are considered as his mature works. The aim of this paper is to analyze Sepehri's "The Primeval Call" based on Lacan's psychological theory. The analysis of "The Primeval Call" shows that Sepehri has tried to recognize the truth with the help of not only the Oriental Mysticism and Zen Buddhism but also the western philosophy and psychology, especially of Lacan's psychological theories. Language represents Lacan's symbolic order and the combination of "wordless expansion" representing the beginning and the narrator's end represents the pre-language period, which very well corresponds to Lacan's theory. The emphasis of the narrator of the poem to go to the "wordless expansion" implies that word or language is a hindrance in the way of recognition; thus the narrator tries to remove it.