Abstract

The early modern Kurdish poet Sayyid Ya‘qūb Māydashtī was one of the most great poets of southern Kurdish history and culture, exerting a considerable influence over many years. He had a genius for original and subtle Kurdish poem, with the motive behind his literary method being his faith. His Kurdish texts are famous not only for their complexities, but also for their brilliance, their systematic precision, and sometimes the profound faith revealed. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to pay tribute to Māydashtī, as a neglected Kurdish poet and his contributions to the Kurdish literature, and second to present a significant Kurdish fragment of Māydashtī’s southern Kurdish literature which also provides a linguistic data for the southern Kurdish dialects. To date, no translations of the dīwān of Māydashtī into a western language have appeared

Keywords

• southern Kurdish, Māydashtī, Kirmāshān, Māhīdasht, Gūrānī