Recreating Hafez's poetry in contemporary poetry through defamiliarization

Defamiliarization is a literary term of the Russian school of formalism. It was first proposed in 1919 by Viktor Shkolovsky. Formalists believe that de-familiarization is the essence of being literary. This is one of the most important differences between automatic language and poetic language. The artist and the poet have a duty to make comprehension more difficult by de-familiarizing and renewing the meanings of words, thus adding to the audient’s pleasure, literary taste, and surprise. It can be argued that all the strategies that are involved in highlighting a literary text, such as expressive, rhetorical, linguistic features, etc., contribute to artistic de-normalization and de-familiarization. Contemporary poetry, both modern and traditional, has been influenced by Hafez’s thoughts and language. In many cases, the contemporary poet engaged in de-familiarization by highlighting the specific words of Hafez's sonnets. In other ways, the poet uses Hafez’s vocabulary and literary strategies to provide the audience with strange and new poetic arrangements. If we consider the language of Hafez's poetry as a literary language that existed in the mind of the audience familiar with his lyric poems, the changes that have taken place in poetic norm-braking practices of contemporary poetry under the influence of Hafez’s poems can be considered as defamiliarization factors. To this end, the present study focuses on the recreation of Hafez's poetry in contemporary poetry through different types of defamiliarization (lexical, semantic, syntactic, and temporal).

This study aimed to investigate the different types of highlighting and defamiliarization of Hafez's lyric poems in contemporary poetry. With a closer look at the Divan of contemporary poets, different manifestations of highlighting in Hafez’s lyric poems can be identified. The application of these norm-braking practices varies in the traditional and modernist currents of contemporary poetry. For example, the traditional poet endorses and comments on Hafez’s lyric poems, while the modern poet highlights the specific peptic style of Hafez for critical purposes and sometimes to express ideas that are contrary to those expressed by Hafez.This study follows a historical and analytical documentary method and adopts an approach to exploring the de-familiarization of Hafez's lyric poems in contemporary poetry. A study of every contemporary poet reveals all kinds of highlights and defamiliarization of Hafez's lyric poems in their poems. Some studies have addressed de-familiarization and norm-breaking practices in contemporary poetry based on Hafez's lyric poems. For instance, Ishani (2019) conducted a study entitled “Norm-braking, a distinct aspect of Hafez's lyric from Emad Faqih's lyric poetry” and compared the norm-breaking practices used in Hafez and Emad Faqih's poetry. Firoozi (2019) examined types of de-familiarization in the poetic work of Mehdi Akhavan Sales. A review of the literature shows that there is no comprehensive study on instances of de-familiarization in contemporary poetry.

Lexical de-familiarization is one of the ways of highlighting linguistic terms whereby the poet uses norm-breaking practices to coin new words. De-familiarization involves the creation of a new word and enriches poetic words. In lexical defamiliarization, the contemporary traditional poet skillfully borrows special words from Hafez verses and creates new compound words and derivations using collocations and affixation, promoting the linguistic emphasis of their poetic expressions. Besides, lexical differences in modernist movements have helped poets to separate semantic and practical aspects of Hafez’s poetic words and create novel words and expressions through de-familiarization. The poet separates the words of Khajeh's divan from its semantic burden and everyday use and transforms them into a novel and new combination by making them strange. Norm-breaking practices in the imaginary forms of poetry de-familiarize the meaning of poetic words. The modern poet looks at Hafez's lyric poems from an unconventional point of view to come up with an unfamiliar meaning. The poet also breaks conventional concepts of imaginary forms, judges them from a different perspective, and creates poetic prominence by creating new meanings in poetry. The contemporary traditional poet uses poetic techniques such as metaphor and irony as the predominant aspects of Hafez's sonnets to highlight and de-familiarize instances of Hafez's lyric poems.In the poet's syntactic de-familiarization, the poet uses poetic elements and dismisses syntactic rules of normative language. As a result, poetry transcends the syntactic rules of normative language by shifting the constituent elements of the sentence, thus leading to de-familiarization.One of the poetic strategies used by the contemporary poet for de-familiarizing Hafez's sonnets is the employment of syntactic changes and the use of ancient words (lexical and syntactic archeology). Temporal deviation (archaism) is the use of words that were common in the past but are not common in the modern language. The use of old and archaic words in modern poetry gives prominence to the poetic language and, if used correctly, can lead to de-familiarization. Contemporary traditional poets have used mythical words, words related to the history and culture of the past, verbs or derivatives of verbs with ancient prefixes, etc. from Hafez's lyric poems to highlight and de-familiarize poetic norms. Syntactic archeology uses the syntactic structure of the past in sentence components or prepositions, and this promotes the archaic atmosphere of the poetry. Contemporary poets have used syntactic archeology, trying to deviate from the norm of Hafez's lyric poems and promoting the linguistic prominence of the poems.

A review of the literature shows that all kinds of de-familiarization of Hafez's lyric poems have been used in contemporary poetry. But these highlighting practices vary in traditional and modern poetry. For example, the traditional poet endorses and comments on Hafez’s lyric poems, while the modern poet highlights the specific peptic style of Hafez for critical purposes and sometimes to express ideas that are contrary to those expressed by Hafez. However, by borrowing from Hafez's poems and de-familiarization, the contemporary poet has not only enriched his poetry aesthetically, but by creating special poetic arrangements, he has added many lexical items to the contemporary poetry. In general, norm-breaking practices are widely used in contemporary poetry. All these emphases and de-familiarization have been used in the service of poetry and for expressive purposes. In this article, it was not possible to describe and address all of them. However, it should be noted that semantic de-normalization has the highest frequency in contemporary poetry and its norm-breaking practices can be significantly found in simile, metaphor, irony, and illustration.