Ali Ahmad Said Esber, known in the Western world as Adūnīs wrote A Time Between Ashes and Roses in Arabic in 1971. Shawkat Toorawa translated it in 2004. Adūnīs is a Syrian poet, essayist, translator and a literary critic, and he was the most controversial literary figure in the Arab world during the second half of the twentieth century. His poems received stern criticism by many Arab literary scholars and religious entities, resulting in death threats. He was forced into exile to Lebanon first, where he worked to write poetry and teach at a university, but then moved to France when the civil war broke out in 1980. He is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in literature in his regular nominations since 1988.
Shawkat Toorawa, on …show more content…
The woman with a star is a reference to the Statue of Liberty in New York and a prevalent image that Adūnīs repeats in other poems. However, this is only one example of several mistranslations in the poems in which the translator either preferred to be literal and preserve fidelity of the texts or that he misunderstood Adūnīs poetic imagery.
While it seems impossible to do justice to all implications in other poems, there is no explanation for the translator 's choices of the mihrab and rabab in preference to Muslims’ direction in prayers and the name of a traditional musical instrument respectively. This is again a literal translation of the poem to which Toorawa fails to render the intended meaning: Adūnīs uses mihrab to signify peace while rabab means harmony (Adūnīs 81). Such literalness confuses readers of the target language and eventually affects the overall coherence and content of the poem. The trot of line below illustrates the idea.
In the honey of the rabab and the mihrab
محراب ال و رباب ال في عسل ال …show more content…
The overall content and meaning of each poem is thereby the primary focus here, and the structure of the poems, the appearance on the page and the lines length are also important factors in knowing more about Toorawa’s translation style. Specifically, this means investigating the techniques that the translator uses to transplant intricate structures of complex poetic passages from the source language into English. Furthermore, the analysis should point to the specific ways of thinking and human experiences in the source language that are foreign to Anglophone perceptions, thereby articulating the differences that emerge between the two cultures. Through a detailed juxtaposition of original text and its recreation in the translation, the reader can travel to the limits of translation. This is a means of establishing the point at which the translator encounters the impossibility of carrying cultural and aesthetic nuances from one language into another. At the same time, I shall open new views for the reader to comprehend different ways of interpreting perceptions and emotions in the linguistic and cultural context of another culture. The emotional needs of people in different cultures are the same, but how one perceives and expresses them is different from one language to the next. A list of ‘aesthetic devices’ below contributes to further investigation:
Content Meaning Concepts Imagery Key
Shawkat Toorawa, on …show more content…
The woman with a star is a reference to the Statue of Liberty in New York and a prevalent image that Adūnīs repeats in other poems. However, this is only one example of several mistranslations in the poems in which the translator either preferred to be literal and preserve fidelity of the texts or that he misunderstood Adūnīs poetic imagery.
While it seems impossible to do justice to all implications in other poems, there is no explanation for the translator 's choices of the mihrab and rabab in preference to Muslims’ direction in prayers and the name of a traditional musical instrument respectively. This is again a literal translation of the poem to which Toorawa fails to render the intended meaning: Adūnīs uses mihrab to signify peace while rabab means harmony (Adūnīs 81). Such literalness confuses readers of the target language and eventually affects the overall coherence and content of the poem. The trot of line below illustrates the idea.
In the honey of the rabab and the mihrab
محراب ال و رباب ال في عسل ال …show more content…
The overall content and meaning of each poem is thereby the primary focus here, and the structure of the poems, the appearance on the page and the lines length are also important factors in knowing more about Toorawa’s translation style. Specifically, this means investigating the techniques that the translator uses to transplant intricate structures of complex poetic passages from the source language into English. Furthermore, the analysis should point to the specific ways of thinking and human experiences in the source language that are foreign to Anglophone perceptions, thereby articulating the differences that emerge between the two cultures. Through a detailed juxtaposition of original text and its recreation in the translation, the reader can travel to the limits of translation. This is a means of establishing the point at which the translator encounters the impossibility of carrying cultural and aesthetic nuances from one language into another. At the same time, I shall open new views for the reader to comprehend different ways of interpreting perceptions and emotions in the linguistic and cultural context of another culture. The emotional needs of people in different cultures are the same, but how one perceives and expresses them is different from one language to the next. A list of ‘aesthetic devices’ below contributes to further investigation:
Content Meaning Concepts Imagery Key