A Critical Study of the Translation of “Trends in Contemporary Arabic Poetry” Based on the Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

Iḥsān Abbās (1920-2003), Palestinian literary scholar, critic, editor, translator and historian, was a renowned and unique scholar in the contemporary era. He produced various valuable works including translation, editing and literary criticism. One of his critical works is Trends in Contemporary Arabic Poetry. Since its first publication in 1977, this book has been a reputable source in the field of contemporary Arabic poetry criticism, especially the poems of pioneering poets. This book has eight chapters and one appendix. Those eight chapters deal with the criticism of contemporary Arabic poetry. That appendix contains some poems which were examined in the eight chapters. This book was translated into Persian by Habib Allāh Abbāsi with a preface and footnotes in 2005. This translation is a hasty, confused and full of obvious faults and errors including neglecting Arabic grammar, mistranslating words, terms and sentences, neglecting context, register and subject and leaving out parts of the book. The method that is used to analyze this translation is a contrastive approach. What will be studied in this paper is only the tip of the iceberg. In other words, errors in the translated text, especially in the prose parts of the book, show us that they are not in many cases in harmony with the original Arabic text but are in total contrast with it. The errors in this translation are to such an extent that retranslation or at least a total revised edition is an inevitable necessity.

Keywords

• contrastive analysis
• trends in contemporary arabic poetry
• iḥsān abbās
• translation
• habib allāh abbāsi