Translating Arabic political poetry into English

Abstract EN

This study addresses the translatability of political emotive expressions in poetry from Arabic into English.

The ambition of this study is to enrich the literature on translation with new examples of emotiveness by pointing out the expected problem areas when translating emotive expressions.

Furthermore, this study is significant since it attempts to answer the question of whether political emotiveness constitutes a problem when translating from Arabic into English or not.

The English translations are selected from The Butterfly’s Burden translated by Fady Joudah (2007) to some of Mahmoud Darwish poems which can be found in Darwish’s most recent poetry collections included in the 2009 edition published by Riad Elrayyes books.

The study revealed that political emotiveness in Darwish's poetry is translatable into English for a certain degree because of three reasons; people as human beings share many things in common including emotions; some themes used by Darwish are universal, and therefore translatable; and because references, symbols, biblical and the Quranic allusions used by Darwish are readable and shared.

Introduction Emotiveness, or emotive meaning is part of the connotative meaning of a concept or a word, and the meaning therefore differs from person to person and from one language to another, and consequently from culture to culture.

Emotive expressions might in some cases depend on the context, text type and the intention of the speaker.

Such expressions might also be used to emotionally impact the addressee or to reveal the speaker’s reaction or feelings towards the subject matter.

The expressions of emotiveness can also be positive or negative.

Different scholars have studied emotive expressions and divided them differently, either into: phonetic/phonological, morphological, lexical units, syntactical, intonational, and the use of direct address (Volek, 1987 and Shamma 1978).

Or into two types: negative and positive, and traces the main sources of emotive expressions to figures of speech and cultural expressions (Shunnaq 1993, 1999, and 2006), (Both cited by Mahasneh 2016: 270).

Emotions are