Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T06:15:06.577Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Allure of Untranslatability: Shafiʿi-Kadkani and (Not) Translating Persian Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Aria Fani
Aria Fani*
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

How could one translate into any European language a Persian poem as culturally and aesthetically embedded as this hemistich by Hāfez: beh may sajjādeh rangin kon garat pir-e moghān guyad. This is the central question Mohammad-Rezā Shafiʿi-Kadkani addresses in his essay titled “On Poetic Untranslatability.” For Shafiʿi, translation is primarily a function of cultural—and not linguistic—affinity. Therefore, he argues that Hāfez’s poem is all but untranslatable in European languages given their fundamental cultural difference from Persian. This article critically engages Shafiʿi’s essay by outlining and analyzing the set of problematic assumptions embedded in its rubric of untranslatability. It places Shafiʿi’s view on translation in conversation with theorists of untranslatability in comparative literature and translation studies. Ultimately, it outlines why untranslatability is not a useful conceptual framework for the analysis of linguistic and cultural difference.

Keywords

UntranslatabilityPersian poetryShafiʿi-KadkaniEmily Apter
Type
Narration and Translation
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 1-2 , March 2021 , pp. 95 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ali, Rozina. “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi.” The New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumiGoogle Scholar
Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Apter, Emily. “Untranslatables: A World System.” New Literary History 39, no. 3, Literary History in the Global Age (Summer 2008):581–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Apter, Emily. Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic. London: Verso Books, 2018.Google Scholar
Aslan, Reza. Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.Google Scholar
Azadibougar, Omid, and Patton, Simon. “Coleman Barks’ Versions of Rumi in the USA.” Translation and Literature 24 (2015): 172–189. doi: 10.3366/tal.2015.0200CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Google Scholar
Brookshaw, Dominic Parviz. Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth Century Iran. London: I.B Tauris, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassin, Barbara, et al. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Creswell, Robyn. “Is Arabic Untranslatable?” Public Culture 28, no. 3 (2016): 447–456. doi: 10.1215/08992363-3511490CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Dick. “On Not Translating Hafez.” New England Review 25, no. 1–2 (1990): 310–318.Google ScholarPubMed
Davis, Dick. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. New York: Penguin Books, 2013.Google Scholar
Fani, Aria. “Becoming Literature: The Formation of Adabiyāt as an Academic Discipline in Iran and Afghanistan (1895–1945).” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2019.Google Scholar
Ferdowsi, Ali. “The ‘Emblem of the Manifestation of the Iranian Spirit’: Hāfez and the Rise of the National Cult of Persian Poetry.” Iranian Studies 41, no. 5 (2008): 667–691. doi: 10.1080/00210860802518327CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzgerald, Edward. “Letter to E. B. Cowell.” The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings. Vol. 6. New York: Doubleday, 1902.Google Scholar
Flood, Finbarr. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu- Muslim” Encounter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Frost, Robert. “Message to the Poets of Korea (1957).” In The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Richardson, Mark, 182–183. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Gould, Rebecca Ruth. “Hard Translation: Persian Poetry and Post-National Literary Form.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 54, no. 2 (2018): 191–206. doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqx039CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Rebecca Ruth. “Inimitability versus Translatability The Structure of Literary Meaning in Arabo-Persian Poetics.” The Translator, 19, no. 1 (2013): 81–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grigor, Talinn. Building Iran. New York: Periscope Publishing, 2009.Google Scholar
Hāfez. Aghānī Shīrāz, Aw: Ghazalīyāt Hāfez Al-Shīrāzī. Trans. Shawāribī, Ibrāhīm A; preface Tāhā Husayn. al-Qāhirah: Maṭbaʿat Lajnat al-Taʾlīf wa-al-Tarjamah wa-al-Nashr, 1944.Google Scholar
Hāfez. Dīvān-e Khājeh Shams ol-Din Mohammad Hāfez. Ed. Khānlari, Parviz Nātel. Tehran: Khārazmi, 1983.Google Scholar
Hāfez. The Dīvān. Translated by Clarke, H. W. London: Octagon Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Hāfez. Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals. Translated by Squires, Geoffrey. Oxford, OH: Miami University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Hillmann, Michael Craig. “The Translatability of Hāfiẓian Love Ghazals.” International Journal of Persian Literature 3 (2018): 39–90. doi: 10.5325/intejperslite.3.1.0039CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayot, Eric. “Against Historicist Fundamentalism.” PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1416.Google Scholar
Jabbari, Alexander. “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 3 (2016): 418–434. doi: 10.1215/1089201x-3698971CrossRefGoogle Scholar
al-Jāḥiẓ, Abū ʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr. Kitāb al-Hayawān. Ed. Muhammad Hārun, ʿAbdol Islām. Vol. 1. N.p.: n.p., 1965.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In On Translation, ed. Brower, Reuben Arther, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. Recasting Persian Poetry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. “Beyond Translation: Interactions between English and Persian Poetry.” In Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics, ed. Keddie, Nikki R., and Matthee, Rudolph P, 36–60. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Key, Alexander. “Translation of Poetry from Persian to Arabic: ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī and Others.” Journal of Abbasid Studies, Special issue: ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī, 5, no. 1–2 (2018): 146–176. doi: 10.1163/22142371-12340037CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khānlari, Parviz Nātel, ed. Dīvān-e Khājeh Shams ol-Din Mohammad Hāfez. Tehran, Khārazmi, 1983.Google Scholar
Kiarostami, Abbas. Hāfez beh Revāyat-e ʿAbbās Kiyārostami. Tehran: Farzān Ruz, 2006.Google Scholar
Kilito, Abdelfattah. Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. Trans. Hassan, Waïl. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kronfeld, Chana. The Full Severity of Compassion: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Kuru, Selim, S., and Inan, Murat U., “Reintroducing Hafez to Readers in Rum: Sudi’s Introduction to His Commentary on Hafez’s Poetry Collection.” Journal of Turkish Studies, 35/1 (June 2011): 11–34.Google Scholar
Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Loloi, Parvin. Hâfiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography: English Translations since the Eighteenth Century. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Louie, Linda Danielle. “Repatriating Romance: Politics of Textual Transmission in Early Modern France.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2017.Google Scholar
Losensky, Paul. “The Creative Compiler: The Art of Rewriting in ʿAṭṭār’s Tazkirat al- awliyāʾ.” In The Necklace of the Pleiades: Studies in Persian Literature Presented to Heshmat Moayyad on his 80th Birthday, ed. Lewis, Franklin, and Sharma, Sunil, 107–119. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Masih, Hivā. Sad ghazal-e enteqādi-ye Hāfez. Tehran: Nashr-e Mosallas, 2012.Google Scholar
Marashi, Afshin. “Imagining Hāfez: Rabindranath Tagore in Iran, 1932.” Journal of Persianate Studies 3, no. 1 (2010): 46–77. doi: 10.1163/187471610X505951CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mason, Alane, Felman, Dedi, and Schnee, Samantha. Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations. New York: The New Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Nanquette, Laetitia. “The Translations of Modern Persian Literature in the United States: 1979–2011.” The Translator 23 (2017): 49–66. doi: 10.1080/13556509.2016.1227530CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Otnes, Per. Other-Wise: Alterity, Materiality, Mediation. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Rastegar, Kamran. “The Gulistan: Sublimity and the Colonial Credo of Translatability,” In Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations in the late 19th-century Middle East, edited by Booth, Marilyn, 300–331. Edinbrugh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Robinson, Peter. Poetry & Translation: The Art of the Impossible. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachau, Edward Carl. Ethé Hermann, and Bodleian Library. Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindûstânî, and Pushtû Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. Part I, The Persian Manuscripts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889.Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mohammad Reza. Musiqī-ye sheʿr [The music of poetry]. Tehran: Muʾassaseh-ye enteshārāt-e āgāh, 1989.Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mohammad Reza. “Dar tarjomeh nāpaziri-ye sheʿr.” Iran Shinasi 56 (1381/2002): 743–749.Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, “Dar tarjomeh nāpaziri-ye sheʿr.” Hasti 2.3, no. 11 (2002).Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mohammad Reza. In kimiyā -ye hasti: majmuʿeh-ye maqāleh’hā va yāddāsht’hā-ye ostād doktor Shafiʿi-Kadkani dar bāre-ye Hāfez. Tabriz: Enteshārāt-e Āydin, 2006.Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mohammad Reza. Zamineh-ye ejtemāʻi-e sheʿ r-e fārsi [The social context of Persian poetry]. Tehran: Nashr-i akhtarān, 2007.Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mohammad Reza. Bā cherāgh va āyeneh. Tehran, Sukhan, 2011.Google Scholar
Shafiʿi-Kadkani, Mohammad Reza. “Dar tarjomeh nāpaziri-ye sheʿr.” Bokhārā 80 (April–May 2011):82–88.Google Scholar
Shayegan, Dariush. Panj eqlim-e hozur (Ferdowsi, Khayyām, Mowlavi, Saʿdi, Hāfez): Bahsi darbāreh-ye shāʿerānegi-ye Irāniyān. Tehran: Farhang Moʿāser, 2014.Google Scholar
Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Taher-Kermani, Reza. “FitzGerald’s Anglo-Persian Rubáiyát.” Translation and Literature 23 (2014): 321–335. doi: 10.3366/tal.2014.0162CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Kat. “Rumi for the New-Age Soul: Coleman Barks and the Problems of Popular Translations.” Ajam Media Collective. ajammc.com/2015/03/09/rumi-for-the-new-age-soul/Google Scholar
Tylus, Jane, and Newman, Karen. Early Modern Cultures of Translation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Provocations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yaşın, Mehmet. Step-Mother Tongue: From Nationalism to Multiculturalism: Literatures of Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. London: Middlesex University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Zadeh, Travis. The Vernacular Qur'an: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Zakeri, Mohsen. “Some Early Persian Apophthegmata (TAWQĪʿĀT) in Arabic Transmission.” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 27 (2002): 283–304.Google Scholar