Translating Arabic Political Poetry into English
Anjad Mahasneh, Translation Department, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan.
Abstract
This study addresses the translatability of political emotive expressions in poetry from Arabic into English. The ambition of this study is to enrich the literature on translation with new examples of emotiveness by pointing out the expected problem areas when translating emotive expressions. Furthermore, this study is significant since it attempts to answer the question of whether political emotiveness constitutes a problem when translating from Arabic into English or not.
The English translations are selected from The Butterfly’s Burden translated by Fady Joudah (2007) to some of Mahmoud Darwish poems which can be found in Darwish’s most recent poetry collections included in the 2009 edition published by Riad Elrayyes books.
The study revealed that political emotiveness in Darwish's poetry is translatable into English for a certain degree because of three reasons; people as human beings share many things in common including emotions; some themes used by Darwish are universal, and therefore translatable; and because references, symbols, biblical and the Quranic allusions used by Darwish are readable and shared.