Abstract:
Les années 1910 ont connu une grande crise en Iran et sur l’échiquier mondial. Les événements après la Révolution Constitutionnelle et avant la Première Guerre mondiale ont préparé le terrain à une grande évolution sociopolitique, ce qui a entraîné une réforme littéraire dans notre pays : le roman, la nouvelle et plus tard la poésie moderne ont émergé. C'est à cette époque-là que Nima Youshij a composé son fameux poème « Clair de Lune ». Formé dans un lycée francophone, Nima a été influencé par la poésie moderne française, surtout celle parsemée de symboles permettant aux poètes de décrire la réalité. Cependant, les érudits de son époque se montraient réticents envers cette évolution. Il fallait attendre des années pour que sa poésie soit saluée par ses lecteurs et que le poète soit reconnu comme pionnier de la « Nouvelle Poésie » persane. Cet article a pour objectif d’étudier « Clair de Lune », en s’appuyant sur la sociocritique de Claude Duchet afin de voir comment la poétique du texte se mêle au discours social, ce qui nous a amenées à la conclusion que voici : cette nouvelle forme d’expression n’est pas le seul résultat de l’influence des poètes français sur Nima ; de même, elle n’est pas une simple imitation, mais un moyen d’expression des événements socio-politiques de son époque.
در دهه اول قرن بیستم، ایران و جهان با بحران عظیمی روبرو بودند. وقایع بعد از انقلاب مشروطه و قبل از جنگ جهانی اول زمینه را برای یک تحول سیاسی-اجتماعی اماده کردند، تحولی که باعث تغییر ادبی در کشور ما شد: ابتدا رمان، سپس داستان کوتاه و بعد ها شعر نو متولد شدند. در این دوران نیما یوشیج شعر معروف خود « می تراود مهتاب » را سرود. نیما تحصیلات خود را دریک دبیرستان فرانسوی در تهران گذرانده و تحت تاثیر شعر نو ادبیات فرانسه بود، خصوصا اشعار نمادین که امکان توصیف واقعیت های جامعه را به شاعر می دهد. قشر تحصیل کرده در ایران واکنش خوبی نسبت به این تحول نداشت. بعد از سالها، شعر نیما با استقبال خوانندگانش روبرو و به عنوان پیشگام « شعر نو فارسی » شناخته می شود. پژوهش حاضر به مطالعه این شعر با استناد به نظریه نقد اجتماعی کلود دوشه می پردازد تا به چگونگی ارتباط شعر با مسايل اجتماعی پی ببرد. تحلیل شعر نشان می دهد که این نوع گفتار فقط تاثیر شعرای فرانسوی روی نیما نبوده، بلکه راهی است که او انتخاب کرده تا وقایع سیاسی-اجتماعی عصر خود را بیان کند.
There are many artists who were not well known during their lifetime, so their
works did not see the reception of the public at the time of their publication: their readership estimated
the true value of their writings over time. It was by virtue of traditional Persian versification that Nima's
contemporaries judged that what he produced was not "poetry". Very badly received when it was
released, “Moonlight” became a cult poem for poets after Nima. In this poem, Nima puts himself in the
shoes of a traveler who arrives at a village whose inhabitants are plunged into a deep sleep. Finding
himself in a space of incommunicability, the traveler leaves the place, leaving the villagers in their
situation. The reading and translation into French of "Moonlight" revealed to us the significant presence
of a society in this poetry, hence the preparatory questions consisting in seeing how the poet apprehends
this space and conceives the communication between the traveler and the villagers, what the symbols
represent in the socio-historical discourse of poetry and in the representation of the literary situation of
Iran at the time when this poem was born. This will allow us to answer the fundamental research
question, namely whether "Moonlight" is a simple imitation of the new form of French poetry that Nima
knew or this poetry, thanks to its particularities, better expresses the essential concerns of the poet. For
this, we should, above all, take a look at the research already done around this poem. Pioneer of a new
poetic wave in Iran, Nima has been the subject of much research, most of which has studied the traces
of French romantic, symbolist and surrealist poets in his texts.
But in the aforementioned research, we have not encountered any that would have studied the problem
of our article, that of studying this poem in the light of Duchet's sociocriticism, and very few have chosen
"Moonlight", a poem by Nima Youshij, as an object of socio-historical studies. As the demands and
expectations of the time are strictly associated with socio-historical and socio-cultural events, we will
therefore examine the relationship that exists between social discourse and this poetic text. This will
guide us towards the study of the social, historical and literary situation of the time when Nima’s poetry
emerged, before moving on to Nima and his poem "Moonlight" (1921).
Let us first define sociocriticism: its mission is to study and highlight the marks of the social in literary
productions. In an article considered as a manifesto of his theory and entitled "For a sociocriticism or
variations on an incipit", Duchet underlines the importance of literary sociology, because for this
theorist, the first objective of sociocriticism is to integrate sociology into the heart of the text. This
inward reorientation shows all the interest that Duchet attributes to what the literary text affirms in a
specific way. Hence the second objective of his theory, that of taking root in the work of the formalists,
not in an attempt to identify transhistorical literary forms, but in order, on the contrary, to redirect oneself
outside the text in order to perceive in what extent the latter is defined by its social context. SocioSharareh
CHAVOSHIAN — Extended abstract: Duchet’s Approach to “Moonlight”: … | 40
poetics, as Duchet pointed out, becomes the attempt to reconnect with the textual object: leaving social discourse the responsibility of capturing everything that touches the surroundings of the text, socio-poetics concentrates its efforts on defining the status of the social in the text and not the social status of the text”, to perceive “the distance between the initial ideological projects and the ideological work of the text” and to favor a sociocriticism which bets on the literary text as an object essential. Seeking to apprehend the Persian literature of the 1948s, to pursue "the future of fiction in such a normative society", Nima plunges his reader into the universe of the 1948s in order to see how the precise cultural situation - the rise of opposition - imposes on fiction a symbolist aesthetic. A large part of the poem is first devoted to this idea of sleep which prevents the traveler from communicating with the villagers. This is what is defined as the “thesis effect”, that is to say a process of normalization which imposes constraints on literary creation. However, the poet tries to perceive the work carried out by symbolist writing on the dominant sociological discourse. Hence the presence, in his poem, of a kind of symbolist socio-poetics, what Regine Robin, a disciple of Duchet, calls "the resistance of the text, of the effect of the text in the face of the thesis effect ".
One could observe that the change from the "I" of the traveler to the "they" of the villagers is often interpreted negatively, insofar as certain critics associate this change with the disenchantment of the poet, with the ignorance (consciously or unconsciously adopted) of the people or to the collective gloom that has invaded the country's intellectual society. We must nevertheless wonder about the validity of this interpretation: does this valorization of the “I” bring only grayness, only despair in the literary landscape? Half of the poetry brings together terms which, although far from collective concerns, are able to transmit values such as awakening, consciousness and above all, this germ or this fine stem of which the poet has taken care (his poetry, his non-conformist thinking). The desperate traveler takes center stage in a scene that is as literary as it is political, presenting the characters, the villagers who take no position in the face of the social context (they have given in to voluntary or involuntary sleep). In addition, they have no access to literacy or literary taste; their knowledge should be limited to what they have memorized from constantly hearing them. To where will the traveler who no one receives be brought back? It comes in two “Is”, one disappointed with this passivity with which the villagers are in love and want to leave the village, the other concerned about the ignorance of the inhabitants, with tears in their eyes, doubting on the threshold of departure. These two subjects, however, reflect the same reality, the same context which is deeply marked by the weakening of collective concerns in favor of a socio-literary evolution, in the period following the Constitutional Revolution. The restricted space of the village calling for immobility and inaction cannot respond to the “I” of the traveler who invites mobility, action, in short, against literary and social hegemony.
In the first two stanzas, the symbols of "light" are perfectly suited to the political and literary situation of the country: the moon does not shine, it is oozing, a light without brilliance. It symbolizes the dull atmosphere that reigns in the country because of the lack of freedom. Nima does not use the verb "to shine", he insists on the obscurity of the socio-political situation. In fact, "the waning moon, left hemisphere of the illuminated star, symbolizes the decline of life and represents the introverted type, directed towards inner life, sleep, fantasy, the collective unconscious where the archetypes of 'humanity' (Julien 204), and this symbol goes hand in hand with the situation of the village. In the third stanza, the poet speaks of a fragile strand, of a flower stem whose cultivation and care were painful to him, as if he had nourished it with his soul. But this strand is at the breaking point. It symbolizes the liberal ideas and the reformist and protest movements which are beginning to germinate and which are nourished by the lives of those who have fought for these sublime causes. Finally, despite his fatigue and his calloused feet, disappointed by this situation where all communication seems impossible and by this desire for ignorance, the traveler decides to leave.
Duchet's study of Nima's poetry would only be carried out by drawing a parallel between the historical, political, social and literary conditions of his time: the time when the first young foreign-trained and
Sharareh CHAVOSHIAN — Extended abstract: Duchet’s Approach to “Moonlight”: … | 41
educated Iranians returned to the country. So Nima was not alone in making this long perilous journey. On the one hand, he knew the French reformist literary movements, on the other, he needed a means other than the traditional molds to express himself in these socio-historical conditions. The need of the time and the knowledge of modern literature contributed to the publication of Nima’s poetry.