Licit Magic — GlobalLIT Working Papers №13. On the Rhetorical Figures Tafsīr (Explication) and Laff wa-nashr (Folding and Unfolding)
Imagine a poet describing the landscape of a sunset over a wheat field by the sea:
Green, red, and yellow:
the sea, the sky, and the fields.
What makes these two lines different from a straightforward description, like “the green sea, the red skies, and the yellow fields”? The way the landscape is offered to the beholder/reader. The scene is rendered first obscurely in sheer colours and then is clarified in distinct elements, as though in a cinematic zoom-out.
In Arabic and Persian rhetoric, this technique is called laff wa-nashr or laff-u-nashr. As suggested by its name, laff wa-nashr involves “wrapping up” and “scattering,” “folding and unfolding,” like a game of collection and dispersal. It’s when a statement or a number of statements are dissembled into their constituent parts and then reassembled in new arrangements.
Laff wa-nashr was in use by the earliest Persian poets but only came to be named as such for the first time in Persian in the fourteenth century handbook of rhetorical figures Daqā’iq al-shiʿr (Minutia of Poetry) by Tāj al-Ḥalwā’ī, after the trope had gained currency in Arabic terminology by Arabic rhetoricians al-Sakkākī (d. 626/1229) and al-Qazwīnī (d.738/1338). They used it as a rhetorical term in their analyses of the Qur’anic language.
An oft-cited example of laff-u-nashr is the following couplet ascribed to Firdawsī (d. 1020):
به روز نبرد آن یل ارجمند
به شمشیر و خنجر به گرز و کمند
برید و درید و شکست و ببست
یلان را سر و سینه و پا و دست
On the battlefield, our honourable warrior
cut and tore apart and broke and tied up
other warriors’ head and chest and legs and hands
with his sword and dagger and mace and rope.
And an Arabic example, ascribed to Ṣāfī al-Dīn Ḥillī (d. 749/1348):
وجدی حنینی انینی فکرتی و لهی
منهم الیهم علیهم فیهم بهم
My passion, my yearning, my lament, my care, my grief
is for them, towards them, over them, about them, in them.
In my latest working paper, I use the symbolism of set theory to describe the making of laff-u-nashr.
First, three sets of analogy are defined:
1. {A [is [not]] [like] [B] [in x]}
2. {A1 [is [not]] [like] [B1] [in x1]}
3. {A2 [is [not]] [like] [B2] [in x2]}
Next, each set is broken down to its elements and then rearranged in new sets:
1*. {A, A1, A2}
2*. {B, B1, B2}
3*. {x, x1, x2}
If you’re interested in reading more about laff-u-nashr according to classical Persian handbooks of rhetorical figures, its typology, its development from another rhetorical figure, tafsīr, and examples of this figure in English translation (a real challenge indeed, in view of the syntactic nature of laff-u-nashr), read Licit Magic — GlobalLIT Working Papers 13, with translations from Rādūyānī, Waṭwāṭ, Shams-i Qays Rāzī, Tāj al-Ḥalvā’ī, Sharaf al-Dīn Rāmī, and Vāʾiẓ Kāshifī.
You can read the full paper here.
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