Poetry in Translation: Traveling Pleonasm and Beyond

Authors

  • Raja Lahiani UAE University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2020-2603-08

Abstract

Style is the kernel of literariness. This study examines the translatability of pleonasm, a form of redundancy considered a standard rhetorical device in Arabic but usually avoided in Western languages. The study evaluates and compares English and French translations of a pleonastic Arabic verse line. An acceptable translation of this verse should provide an affective-stylistic equivalent that will capture and convey the same appeal as the source text with a similar degree of literariness, not just a direct linguistic equivalent. This research asserts that a translator usually works within their own translation aesthetics, developed within their cultural and disciplinary traditions of literary and translational aesthetics and their idiosyncratic ideas about or interpretation of the source text. Keywords: literary translation; redundancy; translating style; pre-Islamic poetry; translation quality assessment

Author Biography

Raja Lahiani, UAE University

Raja Lahiani is Tunisian. She has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), The University of London, UK, an MA in comparative literature from the University of La Manouba, Tunisia and a BA in English language and literature from the University of Sousse, Tunisia. She is the author of Eastern Luminaries Disclosed to Western Eyes: a Critical Evaluation of the Translations of the Muʿallaqāt into English and French (1782-2000), published in Oxford by Peter Lang in 2008.  She also has articles in the fields of comparative literature and translation studies published in scholarly peer-reviewed journals. She has been teaching in different universities across Tunisia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates courses related to English poetry, comparative literature and translation studies. She is currently a full-time faculty member at the Department of Translation Studies, United Arab Emirates University.

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Published

2020-09-30

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 3 (2020): September 2020

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