Review of the latest Spanish translation of Hafiz's Divan Based on Berman’s Deforming Tendencies

Abstract

One of the important activities in the field of translation is studying the translations of classic works. The complete translation of Hafiz’s Divan has been done in the West a long time ago.  Parts of Hafiz's lyric poetry have been translated directly or indirectly into Spanish by famous translators in Spain. Clara Janés, a well-known Spanish poet and translator, in collaboration with Ahmad Taheri, an Iranian translator and expert in Persian sufi poetry, has translated some of Hafiz's lyrics directly from Persian into Spanish. In this article, a lyric poem of the Janés’s translation, which is the last version of Spanish translation of Hafiz’s Divan, has been studied based on four of Berman's deforming tendencies, notably "rationalization", "expansion", "qualitative impoverishment" and "clarification", to determine the deviations which can relate more with criticism of this work. The findings of this study revealed that due to structural differences among factors used in Janés’s translation, "rationalization", “expansion” and "qualitative impoverishment" were the most frequent factors of text distortion, and "clarification" was the least frequent.