The Art of Translating Poetry between Myth and Reality

Abstract:

Translating poetry caused hot debates for centuries and is still causing  lot of controversies.  Many scholars point out the difficulty of translating poetry either from  English to  Arabic or vice versa.  Some of them claim that poetry is untranslatable, and it is needless for the translator to try because when poetry is translated,  it may lose its aesthetic values.  Others emphasize  on the translatability of poetry by using some strategies which swing between foreignising,i.e.,  sticking strongly to the rules of the source language,  and domesticating,i.e.,  submitting or adapting the rules of the source language to those of the target language.  For the sake of knowing if poetry is translatable or not and which modifications should be done to the source text in order to transmit poetic discourse, all with its linguistic,  stylistic,  semantic,  pragmatic,  and its  gleam beauty from  English into  Arabic,  this study focuses on these aspects which should be taken into consideration when poetry is translated.  Moreover,  it attempts to find  out a solution for some cultural gaps that put professional translators in trouble.  Besides,  it tries to drive out  the stereotype of the untranslatability of poetry through a contrastive linguistic study between  English and its translated version of  Robert  Frost’s poetry, which has been given to translation students at  Constantine 1 University.