Poetry in translation: A comparative study of Silversteins monolingual and bilingual (English to Persian) poems

Abstract

Bilingual translations are as important as monolingual ones and can have many advantageous in different dimensions of literature, translation, education and other areas of study. But they are more difficult than monolingual translations, particularly in literary work, such as poem, novel, short story and etc. Translating literary text, particularly poetry is a difficult process as it includes different figures of speech and literary devices and conveys metaphorical and figurative concepts beyond its literally meanings. Difficulties of understanding poet's style and message for the translator is in one hand and techniques of translating poetry and figures of speech which are not appropriate for all types of poems is in another hand. In this article, Silverstein's monolingual and bilingual short poems (English to Persian) were studied on the basis of Newmark (1988) poetry's translation techniques to evaluate qualities of translations and answer these two research questions: 1) Was the qualification of Stein's bilingual poems as well as his monolingual poems in Iran? 2) Were the same translation techniques used in both monolingual and bilingual poems of Stein? The cause of selecting Stein's poems was that his poems have many acceptable Persian translations and also have many followers in Iran. Firstly an introduction on bilingual translation was stated which includes poetry in literature and poetry in translation. Next is the methodology used, followed by results and discussion of the acquired data, and finally conclusion. Key words: Poetry, translation, bilingual poems, monolingual poems, Silverstein.