Nizarre Qabbani’s Original Versus Translated Pornographic Ideology: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Nizarre Qabbani, the modern Arabic poet, has evoked a firestorm of controversy. Some consider him a stunning feminist poet, while others consider him an abysmal anti-feminist erotic one. This study allows his literary works to speak up loud, statistically revealing the dominant genre of his original work and his translated work. This enables the reader to evaluate objectively the original ideology of the poet and the rendered ideology of the translators. A corpus of Qabbani’s complete works is created; the keywords and their concordance are processed automatically and are reviewed manually. A lexicon of his poetic images and symbols is created to focus the light on his filtered-version poems that appeared in the Arabic media. Basic findings are tabulated and compared to the findings of his translated works in order to judge the objectiveness versus subjectiveness and the representativeness versus selectiveness of the translated works.