Investigating Different Aspects of Dorris Sommer’s Concepts of Bilingualism in Shahriar’s Poetry

Azeri-Turkish is one of the languages which coexist with Persian in Iran. These are two different languages with two different cultures, so Azeri- Turkish people can be namedbilinguals. As in any other bilingual culture, languages cross-pollinate each other, with words, grammar, and assumptions. Among these bilinguals, we can observe the existence ofmany writers who have created masterpieces in the presence of the differences, especially inpoetry. According to Doris Sommer (2006, p. 87), Professor of Romance Languages and literatures this event enriches each language and helps those living near both gain anappreciation of other’s culture. Often, both cultures and languages coexist within a single person, creating fascinating aesthetic effects . Doris Sommer, is doing her best to spread the world that a multilingual culture is a rich one, full of nuances and possibilities forexpressing impossible in just one language. She believes that making a balance between the tensions which two languages have inthe society needs a kind of creativity. She expresses her ideas with the emphasis on two terms: Double Consciousness and Hybridity. In this paper, the reflection of Sommer’s ideasare investigated in the poems of Mohammad Hossein Behjat Tabrizi (nicknamed Shahriar),who is the highest ranking contemporary bilingual poet in Iran. Valuable and numerous researches have been done on Shahriar’s poems; including his Azeri-Turkish poems andPersian ones .The article’s methodology is informed by Sommr’s framework on the notions of bilingualism and the occurrence of them in Shahriar’s bilingual creative poems. Doesn’this popularity come from the fact that he had made a balance between the differences andtensions whose existence we can’t ignore among our bilinguals? We are going to come to this realization that both terms Double Consciousness and Hybridity exist in this poet aswell as others, but how he decided to manage it, is the case of our consideration.The results indicate that Shahriar’s poetic language is also influenced by Sommer’s notions of bilingualism as she has mentioned: there is an aesthetic that develops from the use of more than one code .

Investigating Different Aspects of Dorris Sommer’s Concepts of Bilingualism in Shahriar’s Poetry Keywords:

Shahriar , Hybridity , Bilingualism , Aesthetic