Translating a contemporary love poem by Fawaz Allaboun turned out to be a challenging task. Allaboun is a Saudi poet and a Professor of Classical Arabic. He earned his PhD degree in Arabic language and literature at Al-Imam University. He published a collection of poems in a book called “Allabouniat.” Another collection of poems is forthcoming. The first problem that I encountered was in the different words that express the various degrees and state of romantic love in Arabic and the untranslatability of some of these words into English. The second challenge was how to solve the repetition of some words, so that the poem can be read smoothly in English. To solve these issues, I did the trot that Margaret Sayers Peden had done in translating
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Words such as "muta’em," "hawa," "gharam," and "shouq" all mean love, but they express a certain love-state in Arabic. I was unable to find proper equivalents for these varying states in the receptor language (see the final page for clarification). These words were sometimes mistakenly used as synonyms by translators. Additionally, these words can express other human emotions that are not relevant to romantic love. However, none of these varying states of love matched the philosophical meanings of romantic love in English. Indeed, such philosophical differences proved to be a challenging task during my translation …show more content…
For instance, the first line ends with “and I still” as it is shown in the trot which cause abruptness in the line. Also, the same problem occurs in the second stanza, in line seven as it ends with “I wept from.” To solve these, I deleted “and I still” and started the second line with “and I wandered” since the meaning is semantically understood from the context. As for line seven, I moved “I wept from” to the following line and to add musicality to the line I changed the word “wept” to “lament” since the latter has two syllables. Additionally, I kept the numbers of the lines as they appear in the original and I tried to be faithful to the length of each
Words such as "muta’em," "hawa," "gharam," and "shouq" all mean love, but they express a certain love-state in Arabic. I was unable to find proper equivalents for these varying states in the receptor language (see the final page for clarification). These words were sometimes mistakenly used as synonyms by translators. Additionally, these words can express other human emotions that are not relevant to romantic love. However, none of these varying states of love matched the philosophical meanings of romantic love in English. Indeed, such philosophical differences proved to be a challenging task during my translation …show more content…
For instance, the first line ends with “and I still” as it is shown in the trot which cause abruptness in the line. Also, the same problem occurs in the second stanza, in line seven as it ends with “I wept from.” To solve these, I deleted “and I still” and started the second line with “and I wandered” since the meaning is semantically understood from the context. As for line seven, I moved “I wept from” to the following line and to add musicality to the line I changed the word “wept” to “lament” since the latter has two syllables. Additionally, I kept the numbers of the lines as they appear in the original and I tried to be faithful to the length of each