Ronald Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” and the deconstruction of Derrida have stirred huge debates on the role of the author in the creation of a text and highlighted the role of the reader; texts are produced collaboratively between authors and readers and different meanings of texts are generated by readers based on their own realities or metaphysics of presence. The intention of the author, therefore, is a fallacy that readers/translators are not bound to by any means. Actually according to the intentional fallacy, it is both difficult and unnecessary for readers to know the author or his/her realities in order for them to offer a reading of a text because any reading of a text is a new rewriting. Barthes’ and Derrida’s claims are certainly not a license for a chaos of interpretations and meanings because any interpretation is governed and signaled by the text; there is nothing outside the text. Modern poetry provides clear examples of texts that allow for a multiplicity of readings and interpretations. The translator is a reader and a potential rewriter of a translated text since, as a reader, s/he is influenced by the spatiotemporal realities – the metaphysics of his/her presence as s/he tackles the text in hand. While a reader/translator is free to decide on a reading of a text, his/her reading needs to be comprehensive. Some of the major flaws in translating modern Arabic poetry into English happen because of a lack of a comprehensive reading that accounts for all the parts of a poem and because traditional readings always seek a transcendental signified. Whereas free verse gives translators a leeway by avoiding them the constraints of a rhyme and a meter, it burdens them with enigmatic meanings and the demands of the unity of the poem. Many translators are haunted by the sophistication of modern poetry to the extent that they simply transfer segmented meanings making the sentence or even the word the maximum translation unit when the whole poem needs to be the unit of translation. This research attempts to give some recommendations on the translation of modern poetry against the backdrop of the postmodern critical theory; it offers strategies for translators of modern Arabic poetry into English that are informed by the nature of modern Arabic poetry and the modern critical insights and reading strategies. The poem is seen as a text in a field of shifting relations that are governed by time and space and translators are invited to understand these relations, realities and mechanics of modern Arabic poetry so that they can offer acceptable translations based on a plausible understanding of the modern Arabic source poems.

Conference Title

SQU 2016: Third International Conference on Language, Linguistics, Literature and Translation: “Connecting the Dots in a Glocalized World”

Conference Country

Oman

Conference Date

Nov. 1, 2016 - Nov. 3, 2016

Conference Sponsor

Sultan Qaboos University