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5.4.1.4.1 Repetition and repetitional schemes
The form tercîa band, discussed in § 5.3.1.3, is an obvious repetitional scheme.
The first two lines from Sindî’s Nehat, ‘It Did Not Come,’ shown in (319), represent the
only tercîa band poem in the corpus. Throughout a tercîa band poem, each line must end
with the same word or words. In the case of Sindî’s poem, the refrain is composed of the
syllable za at the end of a word, followed by the phrase min nehat, ‘did not come.’ Such
repetition at the end of a line is known as epistrophe (Adams 1997:114). In Nehat, most
lines display an antithesis, which Wendland (2002a:66) calls a “base-contrast”
parallelism. The second part of the line contrasts with a key feature in the first part of the
line. Most lines state that something desirable has not come, while a few lines state that
something undesirable has not come. In the first part of line 1, a negative thing has
occurred. As a result of some people being taken captive, the poet’s self-respect has not
come. It seems that he would have his self-respect if the people with whom he identifies
had their freedom. In the first part of line 2, a positive thing has occurred. As a result of
remaining in love, he has not been experiencing negative emotions that can come from
falling out of love. In this poem the syntactic repetition works to engage the reader with
the poet’s emotional states.
(319) dîl u êxsîr-î 124 ji gel-î bu-n 125 (BS5:1)
captive and prisoner-EZ.M of people-OBL.M become.PST-3PL
ser_feraz-a 126 min ne-hat-Ø
pride-EZ.F 1O NEG-come.PST-3PL
124 While this -î looks like a masculine oblique marker, functionally it would not make sense. It is unusual
for Sindî to use -î instead of -ê as a masculine ezafe conjunctive particle, but the function in this line does
seem to be that of an ezafe particle. It may also be a typographical error, as there is a small difference
between these letters in the Kurdish (modified Arabic) script.
125 In many of the initial lines of this poem, the subject is first person singular. Potentially there is a
typographical error on bun and it should have been written as bum for first person singular. The original
translator had translated the line as, ‘I became a captive…” I have chosen to render it, and discuss the line,
according to the original text.