Levi Thompson's Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry argues for a new understanding of Persian and Arabic modernist poetry that considers the two languages’ shared literary heritage, the poetries’ common mythologies with Mesopotamian origins, and the poets’ own sense of transnational and anti-imperialist solidarities to be more important than Western influence, which, according to the author, has received disproportionate attention in previous studies. Published as part of the Cambridge Studies in World Literature series, the book challenges criteria like “canon, prestige, or economic power” for determining which works gain entry into a single body of “World Literature” (p. 96). Instead, Thompson's study demonstrates the possibility of seeing the simultaneity of independent but concurrently developing literatures within global literary systems. Accordingly, Thompson proposes a revised geography of the modernist poetries studied in the book, one that locates Mesopotamia at its center and treats Persian and Arabic poets as the primary makers of their own poetic movements. On this new literary map, Western metropoles like London and Paris––so often treated as singular points of reference for literary modernism the world over––occupy the periphery. It is a brilliantly argued and beautifully articulated study that shows just how much the field of Persian literary studies stands to benefit from genuinely comparative and theoretically rigorous work.
The book presents case studies of poems by five well-known Iranian and Iraqi modernists—Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, ʿAbd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, and Forugh Farrokhzad—across individual chapters that argue for an interconnectedness among them despite both their differences and the fact that Iranians and Iraqis did not necessarily write with an awareness of the other's works. Thompson's case for reading the poets in a way that may initially seem counterintuitive—going against existing models of national literature on the one hand, and of West-to-East modernist influence on the other—rests on two equally strong foundations that run throughout the book. On the one hand, Thompson conducts close, careful readings attuned to similarities in the poems’ forms, metrical experimentations, and intertextuality. At the same time, the study maintains a macroscopic theoretical view, drawing on theories of relativity, polysystems, global modernism, and unconscious and conscious transnationalism (among others) that show how neither poems, poets, nor, indeed, even languages can be read meaningfully in isolation or as closed systems.
In terms of theory, the concept most central to the book is what Thompson refers to variously as the “planetary,” “global,” or, his preferred term, “the transnational.” Transnationalism in simple terms involves looking beyond the national paradigm, within which studies of Iranian modernism, for example, have heretofore been confined, and seeking connections across nation-state and linguistic borders. Thompson further distinguishes between “unconscious” transnationalism, wherein, for example, Iranian and Iraqi modernists remained unaware of their development along parallel trajectories, and “conscious” transnationalism by which poets intentionally aligned their work—whether through form, ideology, or otherwise—with movements and people in other national contexts (p. 10). Particularly strong cases of the latter occurred with the Iranian Ahmad Shamlu (chapter three), who forged poetic ties with Lorca in Spain and anti-imperialist soldiers in Korea, and the Iraqi al-Bayati (chapter five), who expressed a lifelong fascination with Iranian civilization and Persian literature as he encountered it in Arabic translation. These cases illustrate how consciously and deeply the poets imagined themselves within a world where East-East solidarities proved as—or more—meaningful than their political, cultural, or literary connections to either the West or the Soviet Union.
At an unconscious level, as Thompson shows, Persian and Arabic modernists held strikingly similar views about how to “break” from their shared system of classical poetry in efforts to make poetry new, even if they were not thinking about how they shared that system with one another. Students of Persian or Arabic literature will likely know that the system of prosody (ʿaruż) originates in Arabic poetry and may likewise have some awareness of how to scan classical poems by short and long syllables to determine the meter (which is detailed in chapter one). But Thompson does not merely state Persian and Arabic poetry's shared metrical heritage as a theoretical proposition or index poems’ metrical structure for others to scan; rather, he conducts close readings that include careful scansion, especially of poems by Nima (chapter two), al-Sayyab (chapter four), and Farokhzad (chapter six), to show exactly how these poets took the classical foot as their basic poetic structure, experimenting with line lengths and sound patterns to explore new aesthetic and semantic possibilities while never abandoning the classical system entirely. Thus, while we often refer to “Nimaic” poetry in Persian, which implies Nima as the singular instigator of the formal innovations we have come to think of as Persian modernism, Thompson refers to the “Khalilian” or, at times, the “Arabic” system of prosody to emphasize that Nima and his disciples—like Shamlu and Farrokhzad—drew from the same origins as Arabic modernists, regardless of whether they held any interest in each other's languages or thought of their poetic tradition as transnational in the way Thompson conceptualizes it.
The case for a new map of literary modernism that places Mesopotamia at its center and Europe and North America at its periphery relates directly to a political stance from which Thompson does not shy away. As he states early in the book, his position of writing from “the decaying heart of US empire” motivates his efforts to think beyond national identities (p. 10). In this regard, Reorienting Modernism joins a growing body of scholarship that explicitly challenges the politics shaping studies of World Literature today. In Iranian Studies, two forthcoming books, Aria Fani's Reading across Borders and Sam Hodgson's Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism, promise to further demonstrate East-East literary connections in a conscious effort to problematize either nationalism or globalized, West-centered World Literature as our primary frames of reference for literary studies. Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry should be essential reading for anyone interested in this new crop of politically provocative scholarship. Thompson's study demonstrates how careful, theoretically rigorous, aesthetically sensitive, and historically informed readings of the most well-known Persian and Arabic modernist poets can produce fresh insights into both the poetries themselves and the ideologies by which we make sense of the world.
