Lexical Gaps in Translation of Qur'anic Allusions in Hafez’s Poetry: Strategies and Difficulties

Abstract

Translating culture-bound elements in literary translations seems to be one of the most challenging tasks to be performed by a translator. Taking this into account, this paper discusses the treatment of Qur'anic allusions in translation of Hafez’s Divan from Persian into English. For this purpose a number of instances have been collected and the strategies applied by various translators have been identified. All these examples are highly-specific cultural references or words that are commonly known in Persian culture, but are generally unknown for the target culture reader. The examination of such items has been carried out through the English translations of Clark (2005) and Ordoubadian (2006) based on Venuti’s overall strategies of domesticating and foreignizing. At the same time, the model of this research has been developed by using some of the translation strategies proposed by Leppihalme (1997). It was revealed that various strategies adopted by Ordoubadian (2006) are generally toward domesticating a term and by Clarke (2005) towards preserving its local color and cultural strangeness. Therefore, as demonstrated in this paper, the allusive language of the original poems and connotations conveyed by them were largely ignored by the translator.