Arkawzī and His Baweyaļ: A Feyl Elegiac Verse from Pitiku

摘要

The study of southern Kurdish literature is largely dominated by a bipolar perspective. Literature in southern Kurdistan is mostly, if not exclusively viewed in the context of relations between Iran on the one hand and, on the other, Iraq, the local states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be sure, Iran acquired a dominant role in southern Kurdistan, yet it is also considered to have been the only dynamic factor in southern Kurdish dialect, while the Iraqi regions are supposed to have fulfilled an essentially passive one. This article presents the most well-known poem of Arkawzī, a southern Kurdish poet from Pitiku, an Iranian region of southern Kurdistan. It transcribes, translates, and glosses a Feyl elegiac text in which the poet describes the death of his son. Notwithstanding my dialectological purpose, the article may also provide some raw material for the historians.