Translation of Lorca’s Poems by Shamlou within the Framework of Translation Studies and Cultural ‎Turn

Abstract

The translations of Lorca’s poems by Shamlou, the Iranian poet, are very well known to the intellectual ‎community of Iran. In the pre-Islamic revolution period, which is the focus of this paper, these poems ‎turned into symbols of resistance against the Pahlavi dictatorship among the cultural elites. The ‎present paper aims at identifying the alterations these poems have gone through in the process of ‎translation from Spanish into Persian. This study also looks into how these alterations have ‎constructed a certain image of Lorca’s poems in Iran. The paper is based on the theories of Lefevere, ‎who regards a translated work as an outcome of a socio-political process and believes that any given ‎translation has been produced for a certain cultural and linguistic group. For this purpose, first we ‎study the society of Iran in the period when the translations were made. Then, we study the elements ‎that Lefevere identifies as the cornerstones of translation at that period. As an example, we pick ‎Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias. We examine not only the alterations of structures and ‎meanings in the translation, but also the rationale behind these alterations in order to figure out the ‎goal Shamlou pursued by translating Lorca’s work to Persian.‎