Colonial and Imperialist Traces of the American Transcendentalist Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in Translating Hafez's Poetry
Abstract
This article examines the colonial and imperialist traces of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of the American school of transcendentalism, in translating Hafez's poetry. The main issue of this research is why Emerson paid attention to Hafez's poetry and why did Emerson translate Masnavi number two of Hafez? The purpose of this article is to show that Emerson's translation of Masnavi No. 2 of Hafez's Divan accords with the concepts of Orientalism, that is, in his translation of Hafez's poetry, he considers the West superior and the East inferior. The research method of this article is descriptive, analytical and library-oriented and the theoretical framework of the article is based on the orientalist theories of Edward Said. The results of this article show that Emerson translated and distorted Hafez's poem according to his Western standards and introduced it as portraying wine and homosexuality.
Keywords:
Colonialism, Emerson, Hafez, Orientalism, TranscendentalismReferences
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Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).
