Nazira

Poetical Link Between Bosnian Diwan Poets and Literature of Oriental-Islamic Cultural Realm

Abstract

Nazira is a specific form of divan poetry within the Oriental-Islamic cultural realm, in which a poet imitates another poet on lexical, syntactic and semantic level. Thus, a famous couplet by Hafiz Shirazi, a renowned 14th century Persian poetry writer, was used as blueprint for several naziras written by Ottoman and Bosnian poets in Persian language. This paper, after a brief introductory discussion of nazira as a literary form and its place in the literary history, discusses the Shirazi’s couplet and naziras inspired thereby and analyzes inter-textual relations between them in the light of contemporary literary theories. As a result, it confirms that each of the definition of imitation by Gerard Genette, and understanding of poem as unity of text and intertext by Michael Riffaterre, as well as definition of inter-textuality is viewed as applicable.