Style in Translation of Poems

An Example from Contemporary Persian Poetry

Abstract

As a creative translation activity, poetry translation is considered a transcultural practice. However, the difficulty of translating poetry is twofold: the words and meaning on the surface, and the flow and rhythm (or rhyme) at the root. Also attending to aspects like form, sound, words, images, tone, and content at the same time is not an easy task. In the present study, steps have been taken to compare a contemporary poem, the Winter (Zemestan), with two different English translations (Bashiri and Shahegh), with reference to Vahid and colleagues’ (2008) framework. The results indicated that neither has been perfectly successful in transferring the style of the original poet. Bashiri was found to be semantic in his approach, and Shahegh to be literal. All in all, keeping to all aspects is difficult, if not impossible, in translating poetry from one language into another.