This article investigates the ruptures of the “standard” Persian language, both syntactically and semantically, in Nima Yushij’s writings. Reading excerpts of his prose and poetry, I look at two possible sources for what I have theorized as “linguistic anxiety” in his writings. As noted previously in the scholarship on Nima, the affective disruption of the symbolic relations in the Persian language stems partly from Nima’s native language Tabari, a minor Iranian language, which influenced his poetry. Second, Nima also developed a theory of poetic defamiliarization through his engagement with tropes of poetic ambiguity in a specific tradition of Persian poetry. The impossibility of “mastering” language in some instances of Nima’s poetry poses a threat to the sovereignty of the lyric subject, pushing the Persianist critics to characterize his language derogatorily as “translation-like.” Thinking through the questions proposed by the panel, I argue that, in addition to or perhaps beyond his prosody, Nima’s “modernist” aesthetics emerges when read in tension with the political context of colonial modernity in which “national subject” becomes an institutionalized linguistic sign in modern Iran.