Aesthetic Poetry & Sustainable Translations: A Translational Hermeneutics Reading

Activity: Talk or presentation typesOral presentation

Description

This project investigates the hermeneutic processes involved in translating instances of imagery in Arabic poetry into English across a period ranging between 1789 and 1993. It examines ten translations of two verse lines from Labīd’s Mu‘allaqa, which is part of a collection of seven pre-Islamic canonical odes. The project does not aim to determine whether a given translation is correct—its purpose is rather to use translational hermeneutics as a key analytical tool to identify which translation products may be considered acceptable within the scope of this theory. Translational hermeneutics conceives of translation as re-formulation and, hence, re-creation. What is considered sustainable here is, in fact, the determination and dedication to bring about change, establishing the necessary frameworks, structures, environments, and even the voids that support their growth. The notion of identity is minimized, in translational hermeneutics as well as in this study, by investigating how a source text’s aesthetic message can sustain a different form when translated. The assessment of different translations in this paper’s case study demonstrates that translating responsibly is, first and foremost, translating responsively.

This project adopts a comparative approach that operates at both the synchronic and diachronic levels. By using the assessment tools of translational hermeneutics, each of the translations is compared first to the source text, and then to other translations in the corpus. The ultimate aim is to trace the translations where the aesthetic dimension is sustained, and the procedures endorsed by their authors to manage this level of recreation.
PeriodJun 14 2024Jun 16 2024
Event titleThe Annual Meeting of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association
Event typeConference
Conference number50
LocationMontreal, CanadaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • Translational Hermeneutics
  • Translating imagery
  • Poetic style
  • Pre-Islamic poetry
  • Literary translation
  • Translation quality assessment