Multilingualism and poetry: A cognitive analysis of Shahriar’s poems

This article is to examine multilingualism and its relation to poetry in Shahriar’s works. In the theoretical framework, I have benefited from cognitive linguistics - Anastassiou (2020), Ervin-Tripp (1967, 1964, 1954) and Pavlenko (2012, 2007)- for poems analysis. Shahriar’s Turkish and Persian poems (61 altogether) plus a selected works of his were chosen as the corpus of the study. The results show that phonemes, alliterations, diction, syntax and grammar, on the one hand, and traditions, customs, life and emotional events of the poet on the other, have laid the groundwork for producing his poems and ultimately his image-making. In other words, Shahriar’s poetry is based on his habitat and regional conditions. Hence, one should say that all Shahriar’s unconscious storage has taken route from those conditions and been embodied later in Turkish and Persian languages. The research also shows that despite Shahriar’s strength in Persian poetic production, because of the predominance of Turkish and Azerbaijan’s contextual roots in his psyche, the Turkish poems under scrutiny here have proved more emotional and linguistically more multilayered and from literary point of view more sophisticated than his Persian ones. The methodology has been descriptive- analytical and due to “translingual writings” definition, I conclude that if one cannot assume the English, French and American literatures without figures like Joseph Conrad, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Vladimir Nabokov respectively, the Persian and Turkish Literatures cannot be imagined without Shahriar.