Indirect Poetry Translation: Issues of Fidelity and Adaptation

Abstract

Fidelity has always been a source of controversy for translators. This increases when dealing with indirect poetry translation, particularly between languages belonging to distant cultural communities. Style, aesthetic features, culture-bound words and figurative expressions may be lost when translated from a translated poem, which affects the goal of the original poet. The present paper uses a Translation Quality Assessment model to study a particular instance of indirect poetry translation and the issue of fidelity to the original. It assumes that indirect translation of poetry is feasible and that the question of fidelity depends on both the translator’s competence and the quality of the mediating poem. Based on a comparative study of a translation of Goethe’s poem ‘Ein Gleichnis’ (‘A Parable’) from French into Arabic, the paper shows that indirect poetry translation is possible even between distant languages.

KEYWORDS: Poetry; Indirect Translation; Fidelity; Adaptation; Literature; Translation Quality Assessment