On Translatability or Untranslatability of Discourse of Satire

Abstract

Contemporary Persian literature, especially, on the eve of the Constitutional Movement (1905-9) and afterwards, considers “satire” as a literary genre in which social and political injustice and flaws are underscored in a humorous language. This article, on the basis of Nida’s “principle of equivalent effect” (1966), asks if satire can transcend the geographical and cultural frontiers. The author maintains that, from a translational perspective, texts of satire may be divided into two main groups: ‘form-oriented’ and ‘meaning-oriented’ – the former, usually containing figures of speech, hardly translatable. The discussion proceeds by presenting instances of satire in both English and Persian and the difficulties on the way of translators.