Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Sareh Zirak ¹
• Mehrnoush Kashani Mansour ²

¹ Assistant Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, , Science and Research Branch Islamic Azad University

² M.A. in Persian Language and Literature. , Science and Research Branch Islamic Azad University

Abstract

Abundance of despair and hopelessness is an indicative feature of the poetry of Mehdi Akhavan Sales. His emotionally negative state of mind has severely impacted his poems. The title of the poem under our analysis, “Message,” has close paratextual relationship with the text of the poem. On the basis of this conjecture, “Message” raises the question: how come that the positive and emotional sense of “Message” has any meaningful relation with the overwhelming hopelessness in poem? The purpose of the authors is to explain how the title of the poem has gone through a semio-semantic transformation due to the desperate atmosphere of poem’s text. The narrational analysis of the poem shows that “Message” by accepting an inferior meaning has been transformed into a negative connotation. Here, the narrator closes all doors to any change, whereas if he would have accepted the help of an external actor, there might have been a hope for settlement of his ontological problem and, thus, the narration of the text would have alleviated from extreme pessimism to optimism. But the negative and paramount pressure of sorrow and hopelessness has transformed poem’s theme into its ontological enemy. The process of generation of the meaning of the poem leads to a conflict of life-death semantic form. Meanwhile, due to this conflict, the title of the poem — implying detachment, discourse and accepting others — loses its positive paratextual meaning despite its original social connotation, and due to domination of discourse attachment it shifts to its contradictory meaning, i.e. “no message” (rejecting others).

Keywords

• Semiotics
• Emotions
• Akhavan-Sales
• Poem
• Message
• Instability of Meaning