The Translation of Metaphor from Arabic to English in Selected Poems of the Famous Palestinian Poet, Mahmoud Darwish

i THE TRANSLATION OF METAPHOR FROM ARABIC TO ENGLISH IN SELECTED POEMS OF MAHMOUD DARWISH WITH A FOCUS ON LINGUISTIC ISSUES Mohd Nour Al Salem Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds Centre for Translation Studies School of Languages, Cultures and Societies August 2014 ii Copyright The candidate confirms that this work is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. The copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2014 “The University of Leeds” Mohd Nour Al Salem iii Dedication To my mother, wife, and children as the metaphors for every beautiful aspect in my life iv Acknowledgements My deep gratitude is due to my supervisor Professor James Dickins for his continued support and guidance during the research. He gave me a lot of his precious time and unfailing encouragement. His wise judgement was necessary in each section of the study. Special thanks go to Mohammad Bataineh for his help in writing great parts of the proposal. v ABSTRACT MOHD NOUR AL SALEM 2014 THE TRANSLATION OF METAPHOR FROM ARABIC TO ENGLISH IN SELECTED POEMS OF MAHMOUD DARWISH WITH A FOCUS ON LINGUISTIC ISSUES The translation of Arabic literature into English is a wide field of study. The present study focuses only on one aspect - the translation of metaphor in selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Arabic is widely known as a strongly metaphorical language, and Darwish’s poems as part of Arabic literature hold many embedded meanings and metaphors that play a major role in building up their artistic flavour. In many translations of Arabic poems, metaphors and other figures of speech are mistranslated and, consequently, misunderstood by target text (TT) readers. This affects the meaning, form, imagery and moral/theme and leads to a distorted and inferior copy of the original poem. The present study aims to analyse the Arabic-to-English translation approaches adopted in rendering metaphors in poetic discourse, with specific reference to ten of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems. Six of the poems chosen have been translated more than once. This approach to selection will provide a platform for a comparative/contrastive analysis between different translations. The other four poems are translated only once. In fact, Darwish is a poet of universal significance whose message transcends the personal to the public, and he is well known for using many types of metaphors in his poems to relay certain messages and images to express his themes in an indirect way. The researcher will analyse each metaphor in the source text (ST) and its translation(s) to investigate whether or not the translators have succeeded in conveying the metaphor and message accurately, the type of resemblance embedded in the original poems, as well as the effect of the new metaphor on the reader of English. The study makes use of the fields of text linguistics, lexical semantics, and contrastive linguistics. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgement iv Abstract v Table of Contents vi Appendicies xiv Figures xv Tables xvi Abbreviations xix Arabic transliteration system xx Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Statement of the problem 1 1.2Motivation 2 1.3 The place of the study in the field of translation studies 2 1.4 Research questions 3 1.5 Significance of the study 4 1.6 Thesis structure 5 1.7 Research methodology 7 Chapter Two: Darwish and His Poetry 2.1 An overview 9 2.2 Darwish’s biography 11 2.3 Darwish’s poetry: an overview 14 2.3.1 Separation and exile in Darwish’s life 15 2.3.1.1 Writings on separation and exile 15 2.3.2 Identity in Darwish’s view 18 2.3.2.1 Identity in Darwish’s poetry 19 2.3.3 Homeland in Darwish’s poetry 23 vii 2.3.4 Love in Darwish’s poetry 26 2.3.5 People in Darwish’s poetry 29 2.4 General features of Darwish’s poetry 34 2.4.1 Simplicity 34 2.4.2 Modernity 35 2.4.3 Symbolism 36 2.4.4 The use of myth 38 2.5 Metaphor in Darwish’s poetry 39 2.5.1 Metaphors of perseverance and resistance 41 2.5.2 Metaphors of separation, exile, journey, and homeland 41 2.5.3 Metaphors of freedom 43 2.5.4Metaphorsoflove 44 2.5.5 Metaphors of nature 45 2.6 Theory and practice of poetry translation 46 2.7 Theory and practice of poetry translation: relevance to the current study 51 2.8 Problems of Arabic-English poetry translation 52 2.9 Translators who feature in the study 57 2.9.1 Denys Johnson-Davies 58 2.9.2 Jeffrey Sacks 59 2.9.3 Fady Joudah 59 2.9.4 Mohammad Shaheen 60 2.9.5 Catherine Cobham 61 2.9.6 Munir Akash 62 2.9.7 Carolyn Forché 62 2.9.8 Ben Bennani 63 2.9.9 Sinan Antoon 64 2.9.10 Amira El-Zein 64 viii 2.9.11 Husain Haddawi 65 2.9.12 Noel Abdulahad 65 2.10 Difference between English native speaker translators and 65 Arabic native speaker translators 2.11 Chapter Summary 67 Chapter Three: Metaphor 3.1 The definition of metaphor 68 3.2 The elements of metaphor 70 3.3 Theories of metaphor 71 3.3.1The substitution theory 71 3.3.2 The interaction theory 72 3.3.3 The comparison theory 73 3.4 The place of metaphor within figures of speech 75 3.5. Types of metaphor 77 3.5.1 Picken’s typology of metaphor 77 3.5.2 Kovecses’s typology of metaphor 78 3.5.2.1Theconventionalityofmetaphor 78 3.5.2.2 The cognitive function of metaphor 78 3.5.2.3 The nature of metaphor 79 3.5.2.4 Level of generality 79 3.5.3 Newmark’s typology of metaphors 79 3.5.4 Dickins’ typology of metaphors 81 3.5.5 Semino’s and Knowles and Moon’s typology of metaphors 83 3.5.6 Lakoff’s typology of “dead” metaphors 84 3.5.7 Goatly’s typology of metaphors 85 3.6 Metaphor in Arabic rhetoric 87 3.6.1 The place of istiᶜārah within majāz 90 ix 3.7 Difference between western and Arabic traditions 91 3.8 A comparison of typologies of metaphor 93 3.8.1 Lexicalisation-related aspects 95 3.8.2 Schema-related aspects 97 3.8.3 Size-related aspects 98 3.9 The interrelations between strands of the model used in the analysis 99 3.10 The purposes of metaphor 101 3.10.1Embellishmentandhyperbole 101 3.10.2 Persuasion 102 3.10.3 Description of behavioural characteristics 103 3.10.4 Filling lexical gaps 104 3.10.5 Creating emotional effect 104 3.10.6Showingpowerorimportance 105 3.10.7 Establishing a scientific theory 106 3.10.8 Metaphors whose vehicle literally expresses movement and change 107 3.10.9 Metaphors whose vehicle literally denotes a body part of a living entity 107 3.10.10 Advertising 108 3.11 The translation of metaphor 108 3.11.1 Al-Hasnawi’s approach 108 3.11.2 Newmark’s approach 109 3.11.3 Dickins’ approach 110 3.11.5 Knowles and Moon’s approach 113 3.11.5 Other writers on Arabic/English metaphor translation 114 3.12 Evaluation of translation approaches 116 3.13 Chapter summary 120 Chapter Four: The Corpus of Poems 4. Foreword 122 x 4.1 National poetry 122 4.1.1 A Soldier Dreams of White Tulips 123 4.1.2 Psalm 2 126 4.2 Exile poetry 128 4.2.1TheEternityofCactus 129 4.2.2 Hooriyya’s Teachings 132 4.3 Love poetry 133 4.3.1 Low Sky 133 4.3.2SheDoesNotLoveYou 135 4.4 Mythic poetry 136 4.4.1 The Phases of Anat 136 4.5 Autobiographical poetry 138 4.5.1 Rubaiyat 139 4.6 Identity poetry 142 4.6.1 From Now on You Are Somebody Else 143 4.7 Nature poetry 147 4.7.1 To Describe an Almond Blossom 147 4.8 The importance of metre in Darwish’s poetry 149 4.9 How free verse operates in Arabic 151 4.10 How free verse influences the translation process 153 4.11 Chapter Summary 154 Chapter Five: Analysis 5.Introduction 156 5.1MetaphorsinASoldierDreamsofWhiteLilies/Tulips 157 5.2 Metaphors in Psalm 2 163 5.3 Metaphors in Eternity of Cactus 169 5.4 Metaphors in Hooriyya’s Teachings 176 xi 5.5 Metaphors in Low Sky 182 5.6 Metaphors in She Does Not Love You 188 5.7 Metaphors in The Phases of Anat 194 5.8 Metaphors in Rubaiyat 199 5.9 Metaphors in From Now on You Are Somebody Else 205 5.10 Metaphors in To Describe an Almond Blossom 210 5.11 How metaphors operate and are translated across individual poems 213 5.12 Translation trend: Formal equivalence versus dynamic equivalence 223 5.13 General discussion and illustrations 224 5.14 Chapter Summary 237 Chapter Six: Discussion of Questionnaire Results 6.Introduction 236 6.1 Section One 255 6.2 Section Two 260 6.3 Section Three 264 6.4 Section Four 268 6.5 Section Five 271 6.6 Section Six 275 6.7 Section Seven 278 6.8 Section Eight 279 6.9 Section Nine 281 6.10 Section Ten 282 6.11 Discussion 284 6.12 Chapter Summary 285 Chapter Seven: Comparison of Results 7.1 Johnson-Davies’ “He dreams of her breast at bloom in evening” 287 7.1.1 Akash and Forche’s “He dreams of her breasts in evening blossom” 288 xii 7.2 Johnson-Davies’ “I must be interned with memories” 288 7.2.1 Bennani’s “I must be a prisoner of memories” 288 7.3 Jeffrey Sacks’ “Remember crusader citadels gnawed by April weeds” 289 7.3.1 Amira El-Zein’s “Remember the fortresses of the crusades eaten by 289 April’s grasses” 7.4 Jeffrey Sacks’ “My days hovered over her and before her” 290 7.4.1 Sinan Antoon’s“thatmydays hoveraround her, that my days hover in 290 front of her” 7.5 Haddawi’s “And our prayers turned to bone” 291 7.5.1 Sacks’ “Our prayers calcified” 291 7.6 Abdulahad’s “Profusion of vegetation rent by weeds” 291 7.6.1 Joudah’s “The vegetation of the fields crumble the shackles, O joy!” 292 7.7Joudah’s“Wheneverapoetdivesintohimself” 292 7.8 Shaheen’s “She is thrilled by the river, plunging in rhythm” 292 7.9 Cobham’s “But did not succeed in suppressing the happiness flowing from his 293 eyes” 7.10 Shaheen’s “Words carry

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