Linguistic Deviation in Poetry Translation: An Investigation into the English Renderings of Shamlu‟s Verse

Abstract

Poetic diction has its own characteristic features of which anyone who is engaged in the translation of poetry should have a good understanding. Poetry is not merely a matter of rhyme and rhythm. ‘Blank verse’ is free from such aspects but has still its own poeticality. According to Leech (1969), what makes poetry is the linguistic deviation a poet manipulates in his poetry and therefore linguistic deviation is regarded by him a means of creating artistic beauty. He enumerates eight types of deviations. Since form and content are inseparable in poetry, the translator of poetry should do his best to transfer these two. The translator should also pay attention to linguistic deviations and try to convey them in the translation as far as possible. So far little attention has been paid to linguistic deviations of Persian poetry in connection with translation hence this study tries to investigate this matter by analyzing the deviations in a poem of Shamlu and its English translation rendered by Firuze Papan-Matin. It is shown that though in Shamlu’s poetry semantic, historical and lexical deviations are dominant and determining factors of his poetic style, in the translation, it is only semantic deviation which has a high degree of transference and most of the historical and lexical deviations are ignored, resulting in a great loss in the translation concerning the stylistic features of Shamlu’s poetry.