Equivocation in Vassaf’s History

Abstract

Undoubtedly, seventh and eighth Islamic centuries were an era of prosper for Persian poetry and literature in linguistic, intellectual, and rhetorical respects. The rhetorical Excellency of this period is manifested in metaphor-ism, symbolism, symmetry, and its pure equivocation. This equivocation has a more obvious role in the excellent literary period. Certain reasons, factors, circumstances, and motivations could be identified for the spread of equivocation, and to explain equivocation and its history in different Persian literary periods. Some of most important factors include: 1. Development, prosperity and maturation of Persian literature and the semantic spread of its words in these two centuries, 2. Persian poetry and literature gradually turns from simplicity to equivocation and artistic nuances and reaches its peak in 7^th and 8^th centuries, 3. intellectual development and a variety of thoughts in different schools and the participation of poets and authors in these knowledge paves the way for equivocation, 4. The evolution of styles from simplicity to technical and artifact lead to the conscious inclination toward equivocation; in some works of this time period, such as History, there has been an artifact and ornate use of equivocation, 5. Development of rhetoric studies in this period and their being familiar with eloquence issues caused a development in tending to equivocation and other rhetoric devices. Resalye Tashbihie (an essay in simile) and the eloquence points implied in Vassaf History speak for this truth, 6. At last, should be made mention of the development of mysticism and the combination of love literature and mysticism literature in this era which paved the way for equivocation and ambiguity. Since “mysticism is nothing more than an aesthetic look at theology’’ (Shafiee Kadkani, 1392:19), quite naturally mysticism also caused an opportunity for more equivocations. The aforementioned factors were the reason why poets and authors of the 7^th and 8^th centuries tended to equivocation. While the peak of equivocation-ism in poetry could be found in Hafiz’s sonnets, equivocation in prose, doubtlessly, could be traced in Vassaf History. In this essay, a survey of equivocation-ism has been offered and the following questions have been answered: what are the reasons for equivocation-ism by Vassaf? What are the aspects and instances of equivocation-ism in Vassaf? And what are the functions of Vassaf equivocations in the development of Persian literature’s equivocations? Vassaf’s obsession with equivocation is obvious from some features of the book: an explicit allude to equivocation and its synonyms, extensive assimilation of equivocation in his analysis and illustration of poems in the text, the excellency of equivocation in his eloquence view, extensive assimilation of equivocation and the variety of subjects and contexts of equivocation (lexical, syntactic, historic, geographic, and literature history equivocations and equivocations by means of prosodic words, rimes, literary terms and astronomic, musical, accountant, entertainment, philosophical, jurisprudential, and handwriting terms). However, some factors have greater highlights in Vassaf History: 1. widespread intellectual knowledge of the author; 2. the ornate style of the book; 3. a strong grasp of Persian literary traditions and masterpieces; 4. widespread vocabulary of the author. In addition, widespread intermixture of Persian and Arabic in time of the author, his mastery on Arabic, and on Mongolian words has furnished him with better equipment for equivocation-making; to instantiate the claim that Persian words have been inserted in this book by utmost meaning potency and produced a kind of equivocation which makes this book the grand work of equivocation-making in Persian. We can enumerate positive and negative aspects of Vassaf equivocations. His intellectual abilities, mastery over literary traditions, realizations of linguistic capabilities, artistic intermixture of languages and cultures and reflecting artistic potencies of Persian language are some of the positive features extracted from Vassaf equivocations. Nonetheless, overweigh of word than meaning, audience- dropping, pedantry, and making the text complicate and full of ravelments are some negative features of this book.