Form, the Untranslatable Area of Poetry

Rereading the Literary Theory of Formalism in Explaining the Obstacles of Poetry Translation

Abstract

According to the opinions of Russian formalists, literature is the factor that turns the literary material into a literary work, and it begins when defamiliarization takes place and the common and countless art forms of literary works leave their known state and appear differently to the reader. The importance of defamiliarization in the creation of language and literary work is to the extent that the poetry of the poem is focused on it and cannot be translated. The current research has explained the obstacles in the path of poetry translation based on the principles of the Russian school of formalism with a descriptive-analytical method. The results show that the translation of devices and the defamiliarization process as a factor in creating the device and ultimately the form of poetry is a difficult and almost impossible task. The weight, the music resulting from the combination of words, the defamiliarization of the semantic and structural domain that occurs through the use of many literary crafts, and the interaction of art forms in the process of forming the form and literariness of the text, are among the elements that are either lost in the translation process or in the form of a passive element is transferred.