TROPES – FIGURES OF SPEECH IN BOSNIAN TRANSLATIONS OF THE QUR’AN

Abstract

Translation is a kind of a trial for the target language, a test of its expressive possibilities, but also an exam of the abilities and skills of a translator. Even the best translators refrained from translating “holy books”, due to the challenges of uniqueness of the form and as a precaution of potential sin and (or) blasphemy which translation can cause. However, translating the Word of God, in this case, the Qur’an, is a necessity, and for Bosniaks, it is a national mission, it testifies to their religious tradition written in Bosnian language at a given time. Therefore, translations of the Qur'an deserve a serious scientific analysis and a responsible, multifaceted research approach, about which we have not had a chance to read a lot in linguistics, in particular Bosnistics. The exceptions are the books of Dž. Latić, PhD, and his scientific and professional papers published in the Proceedings of FIS. This study comprises a corpus of four well-known Bosnian translations of the Qur’an, as follows: Besim Korkut, Mustafa Mlivo (whose authenticity is disputed, i.e. its direct translation from the Arabic original), Enes Karić and Esad Duraković. Furthermore, due to the volume of the material, objects of interest are focused on the first and thirtieth juz (first twenty and last twenty pages of translations of the Qur'an) from which all examples of specific linguistic phenomena and regularities have been taken. The main objectives of this paper are: initiation and actualisation of lexicological and general semantic research of translations of the sacred text, which are grammatically interesting and stylogenic, the research of specific lexical-semantic level of linguistic structure of the translations of the Qur'an and a scientific contribution to the study of this kind of discourse. The task of the paper is to describe, or reinterpret the theoretical principles of lexical semantics of Bosnian language by using examples from the corpus, then to affirm the Bosnian language standard by highlighting examples which contribute to the strengthening of linguistic norm in all segments. For the purpose of achieving the objectives and tasks, different methods have been used: monographic, descriptive, comparative, contrastive and lexical-stylistic method. The Qur'anic text is a real repository for stylistic interpretation as well (and not only stylistic, of course) and its literary perfection is a proof of its divine origin. In this paper, a repertoire of semantic figures – tropes, typical contexts in which they operate, their meaning and use have been noted. Stylistics, no matter how successful it is, cannot penetrate into the secret of Qur’anic ijaza (supernatural origin), “as anatomy cannot penetrate into the mystery of creation.” Keywords: tropes, lexical-semantic figures, stylem, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, periphrasis, epithet, personification, simile