Inquiries into Proto-World Literatures: The Challenging “Literary Fate” of Quatrains across the Persian and Arabic Literary Tradition

For over four decades, Western philological/linguistics studies on Persian metrical systems [Lazard1970; Elwell-Sutton1976; Thiesen1982] have debated the linguistic origins of quatrains (Persian>robāʽiyyāt/Arabic>rubāʽiyyāt). Roboʽī and other prosodic Persian schemes were regarded as being independent from their Arabic counterparts [Prince1989; Stoetzer1976], while acknowledging the coexistence of Persian and pre-Islamic Arabic metrical patterns within a framework of reciprocal influences [Bausani2011; Ashwīnī2011]. Nonetheless, attempts to dismantle Arabic-centric critical inferences about Persian meters/literature sometimes led Western scholars to a strictly prosodic/linguistic observation of the roboʽi/rubāʽī [Paoli2009; Deo-Kiparsky2011]. Such an approach neglects a broader cross-temporal, literary perspective of inquiry into the ontological evolution of the roboʽi/rubāʽī from a metrical scheme into a literary frame for aesthetical experimentations in both Persian and Arabic poetry. Taking these dynamics and critical ‘gaps’ into account, I would like to propose a paper for a Post-Eurocentric poetics Volume as a collection of the Workshop Proceedings: Global Literary Theory Caucasus literatures compared - GlobalLit Project. Within my paper I would explore three areas of inquiry: 1) The ontological shift which led to a different literary conceptualization of roboʽī/rubāʽī’ within the Persian and Arabic literary traditions; 2) The synonymity between rubāʽī as a poetic model and rubāʽiyyāṭ as a literary genre. 3) The terminological and semantic obscurity of the terms rubāʽi and dubayt within the Arabic literary corpora.  1st Section–3 sub-paragraphs (est. 4000 words) Within the Arabic literary corpora, it has not yet been clearly defined how the Persian roboʽī’ (meter) developed into a poetic model within the Arabic tradition [al-Qarṭaǧannī(fl. XIII century)2008; Ḍayf2013], thus being transposed into a compositional structure characterized by specific rhetorical features [al-Ḥanafī1978; Yaqūb1991]). This section will be dedicated to the in-depth analysis of this ontological shift [Fontana2018].  2nd Section–2 sub-paragraphs (est. 3.000 words) The first examples of Arabic rubāʽiyyāt compositions mirrored the typical Persian structure of diwān, including themes such as linguistics and natural science [Ǧabalāwī1982]. However, the influence of philosophical Persian roboʽiyyāt [Scattolin1998] led to the progressive standardization of the rubāʽī poetic model as a philosophical/mystical literary genre [Massignon1954; Homerin2001]. This section will observe this standardization process within the Arabic tradition and its reciprocal influence upon the Persian literary canon [Nallino1920].  3rd Section–2 sub-paragraphs (est. 3.000 words) As illustrated by Thiesen [1982], the Persian roboʽī is a hyponymically category of dubayt compositions (distich poetry). In this section I will investigate the literary and socio-cultural biases which gave rise to the incorrect synonymic use of the terms rubāʽī and dubayt within the Arabic critical corpora [ash-Shaybī1973; Maṭlūb2007]. Employing a holistic, culturally embedded methodology, this paper proposes a closer investigation of the “literary fate” of roboʽī/rubāʽī’ and its spread from the Persian to the Arabic literary tradition. The suggested study aims to move beyond the European grounded/culturally centric approach of both Arabic and Persian in studying this matter and the role of reciprocal literary influences. Mutual biases and cultural ‘rivalry’ (enhanced by Eurocentric analyses), I argue, have formed the basis of the still partial investigation of quatrains. It is thus that I propose a re-reading of the linkages between Persian and Arabic translocal literary examples in global terms, as an example of an inherited Proto-World Literature framework.