WHEN PERSIA MEETS THE CAUCUSES THROUGH POETRY”: ASHRAF OF GILAN’S ALLUSION TO MIRZA ALAKBAR SABIR DURING THE IRANIAN CONSTITUTIONAL ERA

Abstract

Mirza Alakbar Sabir was one of the pivotal literary figures during the Iranian Constitutional revolution in 1907 and the unsuccessful revolution of 1905 in Russian, which affected the Caucuses. He was a role model of many poets of his time including some great Persian poets. In this article, T.S. Eliot’s famous stance towards borrowing from other poets “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” has been adopted as the basis of our survey of some of the borrowings of one of the Persian political poets during the Iranian Constitutional revolution namely Ashraf to see if he has allusions to Mirza Alakbar Sabir. The results of the paper show that Ashraf’s poem is a pastiche of Sabir’s style. He is the translator of Sabir, but he makes some alternations of detail, arrangement, and number of lines tending to play down the presence of Sabir in his work remaining “auditory imagination”.