درباره "قاعده قلب " و چند نكته عروضي ديگر

On the "Rule of Metathesis"

The author, a member of the Persian Academy and a well-known authority on questions of prosody, deals here with a relatively obscure area of metrics in classical Persian poetry, which the late scholar Dr. Parviz Natel Kanlari has dubbed qa`ede ye qalb (the rule of metathesis). This so-called rule allows a poet to use two closely-resembling but albeit slightly different metrical patterns in the same distich: pattern A in the first half-distich and pattern B in the second one. A case in point is the poetry of Qavami-ye Razi, a 6th century A.H. poet of the Seljuk period, whose divan, published in a scholarly edition in 1995, was the subject of a review in this same journal (volume 4, No. 4, Serial No. 16, pp. 6-27). There are some 90 instances in the divan that the editor, Sayyed Jaiai od-Din Mohaddes Ormavi, has found metrically faulty, and has "corrected analogically", i.e. by using solely his own poetical judgement without reference to any extant manuscript. The reviewer of Name ye Farhangestan, Mr. Ahmad Samiʹi Gilani, argued that these "corrections" were unjustified, because the distiches in question are metrically sound on the basis of the rule of metathesis. Now, Mr. Najafi delves into the question, shows that the difference between the two metrical patterns is only in the syllabic order of one foot (a long syllable followed by a short one in pattern A and vice versa in pattern B), cites many lines of poetry from earlier poets, to conclude that the rule in question, which may he better called a poetical exception rather than a rule, went out of usage after the 6th century A.H., and survives today only in the roba`i (quatrain) format.