Mehmet Hakkı Suçin
Abstract
This paper approaches literary translation not so much through theoretical debate as through the translator’s personal experience and the concrete decisions taken in the act of translating. It focuses on two cases: the translation of Yahya Haqqi’s Qindil Umm Hashim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim) from Arabic into Turkish, and the translation of a selection of Hilmi Yavuz’s poems from Turkish into Arabic.
The first case examines how Yahya Haqqi’s dense, image-laden style can be carried over into Turkish, together with the cultural references specific to Egyptian society, colloquial speech, idioms and religious-cultural expressions. The balance the translator strikes between preserving the cultural identity of the source text and producing a natural, readable literary text in Turkish is discussed in terms of domesticating and foreignizing strategies.
In translating Hilmi Yavuz’s poetry into Arabic, the decisive elements are sound, rhythm, lexical associations, internal rhyme and syntactic breaks. The paper shows that semantic equivalence alone is not sufficient in poetry translation: the aesthetic and acoustic texture of the poem must also be rebuilt in the target language. Literary translation thus emerges as a process of creative rewriting in which the translator makes continuous choices at linguistic, cultural and aesthetic levels.
Keywords: literary translation · translator’s experience · Yahya Haqqi · The Lamp of Umm Hashim · Hilmi Yavuz · poetry translation · Arabic–Turkish translation · Turkish–Arabic translation · domestication · foreignization
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Cite this work
Chicago
Suçin, Mehmet Hakkı. “Tajribati al-shakhsiyya fi al-tarjama al-adabiyya: Tarjamat Qindil Umm Hashim li-Yahya Haqqi wa-qasa’id al-shaʿir al-turki Hilmi Yavuz namudhajan” [My Experience in Literary Translation: Yahya Haqqi’s The Lamp of Umm Hashim and the Poetry of Hilmi Yavuz]. In al-Tarjama wa-ishkalat al-muthaqafa [Translation and the Problems of Acculturation], edited by Mujab al-Imam and Muhammad Abd al-Aziz, 163–185. Doha: Forum for Arab and International Relations, 2014.
APA
Suçin, M. H. (2014). Tajribati al-shakhsiyya fi al-tarjama al-adabiyya [My experience in literary translation]. In M. al-Imam & M. Abd al-Aziz (Eds.), al-Tarjama wa-ishkalat al-muthaqafa [Translation and the problems of acculturation] (pp. 163–185). Forum for Arab and International Relations.
Publication details
الترجمة وإشكالات المثاقفة
[Translation and the Problems of Acculturation]
Editors: Mujab al-Imam, Muhammad Abd al-Aziz (مجاب الإمام، محمد عبد العزيز)
Publisher: Forum for Arab and International Relations (منتدى العلاقات العربية والدولية)
Place: Doha
Year: 2014
Pages: 163–185
ISBN: 978-9927-103-23-0
Type: International conference paper / book chapter
Language of the text: Arabic