Translators of classical Arabic poetry face challenges beyond the linguistic

The blog Arab Literature (in English) has a guest post from A.Z. Foreman on the particular challenges facing translators of classical Arabic poetry. The discussion has been ongoing there as well as on Foreman's own Poems in Translation, and this particular post actually arose from the comments section of a previous entry (a sure sign that you should read the comments as well). Foreman highlights some of the typical issues raised in dealing with poetry translations from a language standpoint, but what's most interesting are the difficulties in translating the culture. When the primary devices that are the hallmark of one culture's literature are dismissed in another, things like meter and rhyme that are usually at the centers of these debates start to seem like secondary concerns.

The very notion of what is considered “poetic” is radically different from what newcomers are used to. Panegyrics and satires are marginal forms in much of western literature, whereas they are so central to the classical Arabic tradition that many poets -such as Al-Mutanabbi for one- wrote almost nothing outside of those two genres. It you tell a western audience that one of the greatest Arabic poets of all time (by some accounts the greatest) had basically two themes, and poems written on any one of those two would say basically the same thing in the same format in the same (and only) rhyme scheme with the only variation coming from different incarnations of technical proficiency and inventiveness, it will come across to most as a sign that classical Arabic isn’t worth learning for its literature. Westerners want a poet with more thematic complexity and subtlety than an on/off switch. Put Al-Mutanabbi’s corpus beside those of Robert Frost, W.H. Auden or Ezra Pound (or even those of Ovid and Horace) and there isn’t a commentator in the world skilled enough to prevent a western reader from coming away with a renewed cultural narcissism.

Foreman takes to the comments again to elaborate on how even framing translation as an act of re-writing and philosophically acknowledging that literal translations can't encompass the full complexity of poetry from any era or region doesn't even begin to address the problematic nature of this particular genre's translations. Of course, classical Arabic poetry isn't alone. Any poetry that's dependent on "playing with the idiosyncrasies" of a specific language or employing untranslatable phraseology with weighted historical meaning is going to pose similar stumbling blocks, even for those with the greatest expertise and cultural sensitivities. As Foreman puts it, in these cases "translation would at best be only fully intelligible with a shovelful of footnotes."

But all this is extrinsic to the issue of pre-modern (and especially classical, and of that most especially pre-islamic) Arabic poetry where -aside from the massive technical linguistic issues involved- a whole different aesthetic is at work: and not just thematically or socio-culturally, but materially as well sometimes. No Anglophone English translator/recreator, for example, will be able to find a way to acceptably render Imru’l-Qays’ line about the delicate beauty of animal-dung, without making it not about animal-dung. As most don’t live in a desert or limit themselves to pre-industrial technology, camel-shit and deer-shit just don’t do it for English-speaking readers. No matter how you try and slant it.

We'll just have to wait and see how well Google's poetry translator does in communicating perspective. (Hint: Probably not great.)