Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This research establishes the link between literary translation and creativity, as it distances itself from the claim that a literary translation is a fall from the origin. Poetry as a literary genre uses all the resources of language just to go beyond language itself, which justifies its being aesthetically creative. Its translation is to follow this same path. A case study is adopted by analyzing translations of a verse from Arabic poetry. As the poet boasts his courage and solidarity with his tribesmen, he builds two hemistichs that are antithetically but also synonymously parallel. He supports this paradoxical choice with an alliteration that travels through the two parts of the verse. Also, whereas the message in the first hemistich is phrased implicitly, it is presented explicitly in the second hemistich. Handling such a complex stylistic choice is no easy a task when it comes to translation, especially that this is made functional in relation to the cultural message embedded in the source text (ST). The methodology adopted in this research work is comparative. Comparison is conducted at both the synchronic and the diachronic levels; every translation is compared to the ST and then to other translations. The comparative work proves at the end that the translators who target to copy the ST stylistic features do not necessarily succeed in preserving the imagery of the ST. It also proves that when the ST is creative, the target text (TT) has to be creative, too, but within the norms of its literary arena.