Translation in Arabic language and literature
Amir Afshin Farhadian; Seyyed Mehdi Masboogh
Abstract
Beyond its literary and artistic values, Hafez's poetry is known as a mirror of Iranian culture and worldview. Therefore, familiarity with it by people of other languages and cultures will open a window to the perception of Iranian art and culture. From this point of view, the quality of the translation ...
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Beyond its literary and artistic values, Hafez's poetry is known as a mirror of Iranian culture and worldview. Therefore, familiarity with it by people of other languages and cultures will open a window to the perception of Iranian art and culture. From this point of view, the quality of the translation of Hafez's poems into other languages becomes especially important. So far, at least nine selected or complete translations of Hafez's poems have been published in Arabic, which shows the appreciation of Arabic speakers for Hafez's poetry and thought. One of the most recent translations is the translation of Ali Abbas Zulaikha. because every metonymy expression, in addition to lexical meanings, also contains cultural, historical, and ethnic attachments, translating metonymies into another language that is current in a different context is one of the difficulties of translation is considered. In this research, which was carried out with the method of content analysis and in a descriptive-analytical way, 10 sonnets of Hafez containing 29 metonymies were randomly selected and analyzed using Kendall and Smith's table of numbers. The results of the research showed that in 8 cases, the meaning of the phrase was translated acceptably, and in 21 other cases, the Arabic translation faced serious problems. It is worth noting that 5 out of 21 cases of wrong translation were caused by misreading the Persian text.Keywords: Hafez's Poetry, Arabic Translation, Metonymies Translation, Ali Abbas Zulaikha.IntroductionHafez has a privileged position among numerous poets in the history of Persian literature. Any selection of the best examples of Persian poetry will contain examples of his poetry. This high position is the result of establishing a balance between the two characteristics of beautiful form and deep meaning. Hafez's extraordinary linguistic ability, along with his aesthetics and extraordinary skill in poetic art, has made his poetry desirable to lovers of literature. But regarding the meaning of the word, perhaps it can be considered as the summary of Iranian culture and worldview. "Hafez is not only the great poet of Iran, he is the miracle of Persian literature and the summary of this culture" (Shaygan, 2014: 114). The first feature makes it difficult to translate Hafez's poetry, but the second feature adds to the importance of the quality of his poetry translation. Hafez's poetry shows resistance to being translated in terms of the complexities of the form and the visible and hidden relationships of the words, but since his poetry is the manifestation of a part of the identity of Iranian culture, the correctness of the translation audience's perception of the pure manifestations of Iranian culture and worldview has a direct relationship with the quality of the translation of his poems. Dick Davis in his article " On Not Translating Hafez" says: " Certain poets are held to be untranslatable, or virtually so, and often they are thought of as those that most intimately express the poetic soul of their people (…) The fact that it is often precisely the poets who seem to sum up a poetry’s idiosyncratic potential and identity who are those whose works are most resistant to translation" (Davis, 2011: 74).The importance of Hafez's poetry translation benefiting from a suitable quality, with all its inherent difficulties, makes the mission of the translator of Hafez's poems heavier. Walter Benyamin explains the mission of the translator as follows: "This mission consists of finding that intention or meaning in the target language that echoes the original text in this language" (2003: 44).The world fame of Hafez's poems has been a strong motivation for translators to translate his poetry into many living languages of the world. Among others, we can mention its numerous translations in French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Armenian, Kazakh, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Turkish, Japanese, Arabic, etc. (Hafez Encyclopedia, 2017: pp. 542-585).Due to the extent of cultural exchanges between Persian and Arabic languages, the Arabic translations of Hafez's Diwan are very important. "Numerous translations of Hafez's poems, as well as various academic articles and theses, on the subject of his poems and personality, show that Hafez as a literary-mystical figure in the Arab world has attracted the attention of many writers and poets, including Taha Hossein, Shawarebi, Seyyed Qutb, Salah al-Sawi, Omar Shebli and..." (Zinivand and Almasi, 2011: 57).So far, Hafez's poems have been translated into Arabic nine times, most of which contain excerpts of poems. Mohammad Al Forati (selection), Mohammad Mehdi Javaheri (selection), Mohammad Amin Al-Shawarbi (sonnets), Salah al-Sawi (selection), Youssef Victor Al-Kakk (selection), Muhammad Ali Shamsoddin (selection), Omar Shebli al-Sawairi (selection), Ali Abbas Zulaikha (selection) All Poems) (Azizi, 2013: pp. 75-93) and Nader Nezam Tehrani (sonnets) are the translators of Hafez's poetry in Arabic.Ali Abbas Zulaikha, born in 1958 in Syria, is a doctor and embryologist. The result of his interest in the Persian language and literature was the translation of several famous works of Persian literature into Arabic, among which we can mention the translation of Hafez Shirazi's Diwan, Molana's Masnavi, Attar Neishaburi's Diwan and Asrarnameh (Kakavand and Valvi, 2019: 10). His translation of Hafez's Diwan, which is examined in this article in terms of translation of metonymies, is one of the most recent Arabic translations of Hafez's poetry and includes the entire Diwan of Hafez based on the famous correction of Qazvini and Ghani.Literature ReviewRegarding the Arabic translations of Hafez's poems, articles have been published so far, but in none of them, the translation of the metonymies in Ali Abbas Zulaikha's translation has been investigated.Behrouz Ghorbanzadeh and Shahram Ahmadi in the article "The mystical concept of metonymy in Omar Shibli's Arabic translation of Hafez's diwan based on the theory of Antoine Berman" criticized Shibli's translation of some metonymies in Hafez's poetry and concluded that in many cases the translator understood the metonymy of the expressions. He did not, and for this reason, he has turned to literal translation or ignoring the metonymic expression."Criticism and review of rhetorical translations in the Arabic translation of Hafez's poem by Salah al-Sawi" written by Gholamreza Karimifard is the title of an article that examines the translation of Al-Sawi from a rhetorical aspect. A part of this article is devoted to the analysis of a few cases of translation of metonymies in Hafez's poetry."Examination of the translations of the semantic contrasts of Hafez's sonnets in Ali Abbas Zulaikha's translation" is an article written by Owais Mohammadi and his colleagues in explaining examples of semantic contrasts in Hafez's poems and criticizing Zulaikha's translation of those examples. It is necessary to explain that the study of metonymies was not intended in this article. Hossein Mohseni and Amin Sheikh Bagheri, in an article entitled "Pathology of Transferring Multilayered Semantics in the Translation of Hafez's Poems Based on Catford's Theory of Formal Changes (A Case Study of Al-Shwarabi and Abbas Zulaikha's Translations)" have investigated the translation of the multilayered concepts of words and terms of Hafez's poetry in the translation of the two aforementioned translators.MethodologyContent analysis and descriptive-analytical methods have been used in this research. Overall, ten sonnets from Hafez have been randomly selected using Kendall and Smith's table of numbers for review and analysis in this research. Because the translator used the Qazvini and Ghani correction of Hafez's poems as the basis of his translation, the selected sonnets in this article are considered based on the same order. In each of the selected sonnets, first, the Arabic translation of Zulaikha's verses that contain metonymic compositions was translated into Persian, and then the translator's success in translating those phrases into Arabic was evaluated. It should be noted that in some sonnets, the translator has translated verses into poetry in addition to prose. In dealing with such verses, we have translated both Arabic poetry and prose into Persian and analyzed them.ConclusionThe results of analyzing the translation of metonymies in Zulaikha's translation of Hafez's ten sonnets indicate the failure of the translator to correctly translate those phrases from Persian to Arabic. Seventy-two percent error in the studied population is significant. The main reasons for this failure can be classified into two categories. The first reason that includes the number of translation errors is the failure to correctly understand the metonymic meaning of the phrases in the Persian language, which indicates the translator's lack of respect for the subtleties and details of the text being translated. But another reason is the misreading of the Persian text. The error that occurs in this category, which unfortunately includes nearly a quarter of metonymies translation errors, basically occurs before entering the translation because the text is misread in the same source language, and the resulting translation will be far from the original text. It is clear that Hafez's poem, despite its wide acceptance among Persian speakers, is relatively difficult, and the evidence of this is the large number of commentaries written on it, but this difficulty and complexity is not an acceptable justification for the erroneous translation of a significant literary work. It should be noted that Zulaikha's translation of Hafez's poems is one of the most recent Arabic translations from this Diwan and other examples of Arabic translations of Hafez's poems have been available to the translator. Also, many Persian commentaries of Hafez's poems have been published, which could prevent many misreadings. Undoubtedly, the quality of the translation of the poems of one of the most prominent poets of Iran will have an important effect on the understanding of his words and his literary position in the society of the target language. Zulaikha has not been very successful in carrying out this mission.
