Poetry and translation as bridges: exploring Nizar Qabbani’s translation theory

Abstract

“The poem is a bridge extending across time and encompassing all horizons,”¹ writes the renowned Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani. It is through this bridge of poetry that he continues to traverse and speak to his Arab audience. As an homage to Qabbani—a master of metaphor in all his writings—this paper will compare Qabbani’s poetry in its original Arabic to that of his English translators, who have and continue to strive to bring his foreign readers from one world and language into his own poetic garden. By using examples of his approved English translations and the Skopos theory, I will argue in this paper that the bridge of translation cannot function in the same way as Qabbani’s bridge and that what prevents this bridge from succeeding is the deficiency of linguistic and cultural substances embedded in the text.

Keywords:

• Arabic poetry
• Nizar Qabbani
• translation theory
• Skopos theory
• literary criticism

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Maria del Mar Sanchez Ramos, Modern Philology, University of Alcala de Henares: Universidad de Alcala de Henares, Alcala de Henares, Madrid, Spain

SUBJECTS:

• Languages of the Middle East; Arabic (including dialects); Literature & Translation; Language & Linguistics

1. Introduction

During his 55 years of writing, Nizar Qabbani remained a prolific and influential poet. Many scholars have discussed the significance of Qabbani’s poetry with regard to its literary and social values. Addressing Qabbani as “the most popular poet in the Arab world,” Salma Khadra Jayyusi thinks that he “has been instrumental in modernizing poetic language and imagery, proving that accessibility is no deterrent to poetic excellent.”² Nayef al-Kalali, the English translator of Qabbani poetry, also illustrates the reason behind Qabbani’s popularity in the Arab world:

With his innovative poetry, Kabbani mesmerised Arab masses of all castes and thus founded his own kind of ‘republic’. They felt that he reflected their innermost sentiments in both love and politics, breaking down barriers of fear, reluctance and taboo that prevailed between poetry and people.³

Although his poems are well received in the Middle East, Qabbani has repeatedly expressed his reluctance to bring his poetry to other languages and cultural systems through translation that might reach a wider audience.

In 1995, Qabbani published an article entitled “Arabs bite the moon of poetry” in the Arabic daily journal Al-Hayat. The English version of this article later appeared at the end of Republic of Love: Selected Poems in English and Arabic under the title “How does Nizar feel about poetry translation?” Qabbani’s article contains twenty rules ranging from his views about the translatability of poetry and particularly his poetry, his resistance to having his poetry translated into any language, and a discussion about what he expects from his translators. These rules, as well as his works of prose, such as My Story with Poetry, give us an insight into Qabbani’s theory of translation from his own perspective as the original author.

Before we discuss why Qabbani resists the construction of a translation bridge, we need to first understand his concept of poetry. Based on his book, My Story with Poetry, I highlight several salient characteristics of poetry that he articulated at length:

There is no theory for poetry. Every poet carries his own theory within him. Poetry is different from other literary genres, such as prose and drama. It cannot be moved from mind to paper based on a set schema. A poet cannot explain his intention of writing once he finishes, let alone those who attempt to seek the nature of poetry from the outside. A poet should bear the addressee in mind because without addressing a certain audience, a poem cannot be meaningful. A poem should be seen as an eternal project instead of a dead or frozen body. It should extend across time and encompass all horizons.⁴

For Qabbani, a poet cannot clearly articulate the intention behind his writing, but he should have determined his potential audience before he starts writing. This led Qabbani to strive to communicate directly through his poetry to his people, no matter if they were the long-oppressed women or the corrupt regime. His identity as an Arab poet cannot be overlooked because it has infiltrated into every pore of his poetry, and an attempt to neglect it will only make his work a collection of dead words.

How can a poem extend across time and encompass all horizons then if the poet has already decided his readership? Qabbani wrote, “he who wants to read me must enter totally and completely into my poetic world.”⁵ The prerequisite of entering his poetic world is to read his poems in Arabic since language itself is not merely a strand of semantic codes but also a medium that carries the author’s social and cultural cognition. This means that Qabbani expected his foreign readers to approach him not through a translation that brings him to the reader mediated by a translator but by having the reader in direct contact with him by engaging the original text in Arabic.

Qabbani also did not intend to have his voice heard outside the confines of his own country and culture. He did not “believe in entering the English, French, Russian, Swedish and Chinese heavens”⁶ because non-Arab readers would not appreciate or be impressed by his poetry. In his understanding, the reason that a literary work can gain its eternity is that people share the same resonance with the original text, that is, that readers come to the text linguistically and culturally primed to grasp the text’s significations. Hence, he was concerned that his foreign readers would turn a blind eye to what his Arab audience would value in his work. If the relationship between the original readers who read the Arabic text and the foreign readers who read the translated text cannot be identical, then his readers will not be able to reach an agreement on the resonance that ensures the longevity of his work.

His work has nonetheless been translated into other languages despite Qabbani’s belief that Arabic is the exclusive language of his poetry, that Arabs are his only potential audience and despite his resolute resistance to entering a foreign linguistic and cultural system. Qabbani once stated that he did not want to surrender his body to the dissecting knives of the critics and remain silent waiting for his own funeral where the critics would sit on his tomb and play cards.⁷ It is no exaggeration to say, however, that translators are like critics who expend their energies dissecting his poetry so that they can exhibit the details to the target audience. Hence, Qabbani chose to participate in the process of translation by aiding in the selection of poems and handwriting the Arabic text that would face the English translation.

Gradually drifting from his once unwavering stance that his poetry should not be translated, Qabbani compromised in order to let his poetry be experienced by readers of different languages and cultural backgrounds. Before his untimely demise in 1998, Qabbani had approved three English translations of his poetry: Arabic Love Poems, translated by Bassam K Frangieh, Poems of Love and Exile, translated by Saadun Suayeh, and the aforementioned Republic of Love. Among these three translations, Poems of Love and Exile seems to have received the highest endorsement from Qabbani and rid itself of the poet’s skepticism towards translation. In this translation, we find a copy of Qabbani’s handwritten letter to Suayeh following a photo of them together. In this letter dated on January 1, 1997, Qabbani writes:

إلى أخي سعدون

كثيرون ترجموني إلى لغات العالم.

ولكنّك وحدك استطعت أن تنقل ملامح وجهي، واشتعال عواطفي، وفصيلة دمي..

وزرقة عينيّ.. وطقوس قلقي وجنوني.

مع الحب الكبير

نزار قباني

To my brother Saadun,

Many have translated my works into different languages.

But you alone were able to convey my facial features, the ignition of my emotions, my blood type, the blue color of my eyes, and the rituals of my anxiety and madness.

With much love,

Nizar Qabbani⁸

The prerequisite for Qabbani’s high praise for Suayeh’s translation might have come from their common recognition of the untranslatability of his poetry. In the foreword of Poems of Love and Exile, Suayeh writes, “I am painfully aware that a poem is not born twice, and that a translator cannot hope to recapture the magic of the original.”⁹ Explicitly acknowledging the sacredness of Qabbani’s original works, Suayeh also excuses himself from the occasional title changes and disparate lineation that can be glimpsed in his translation.

Qabbani’s resistance to the construction of a translation bridge is prominent. However, his approval of the translation collections involved the recognition that these translations would not merely produce substitutes of his original work in another language, but rather that his poetry had to experience the trial of another linguistic and cultural system. Thus, in this paper, I will adopt a quantitative research method and compare the original text of Qabbani’s poetry and its English translation, mainly in Arabic Love Poems and Republic of Love, to demonstrate the incompleteness of the linguistic and cultural elements of the translation. Then, I will use the Skopos theory to analyze Qabbani’s intentions that determined the translation’s outcome on another level. I will argue that the bridge of translation cannot function in the same way as Qabbani’s bridge and that what prevents this bridge from succeeding is the deficiency of linguistic and cultural substances embedded in the text.

2. Literature review

In the past two decades, textbooks on Arabic-to-English translation have proliferated and targeted their readership at undergraduate and graduate students who seek a more practical guide (Abdelaal, 2020; Abdul-Raof, 2023; Dickins & Higgins, 2002; Hassan, 2014; Hanna et al., 2020; Husni & Newman, 2013; Lahlali & Hatab, 2014). At the same time, some scholars have focused more theoretically on the linguistic and cultural barriers that arise when translating between Arabic and English (Almanna & Al-Shehari, 2019; Faiq, 2004; Farghal & Almanna, 2015; Hatim, 1997; Stanton, 2023). Given the scope of this paper, I shall focus on reviewing the books that fall under the second group.

Hatim (1997) notices the limited exploration of merging contrastive linguistics and discourse analysis in Arabic translation studies and aims to demonstrate that translation can enrich the current research of these two fields. He also sheds light on the difference between Arabic and English: Arabic is a highly explicative language, and English is an intrinsically implicative language. The proposed model for text analysis in his book is systematically connected to various language processing challenges found in translation, interpreting, language teaching, and other domains. Besides his goal of training future linguists, he also aims to raise awareness among language users about the intricacies of discourse.

Faiq (2004) and other contributors to his edited book demonstrate that translation serves as a profound means of intercultural communication, capable of shaping and influencing cultural identities in significant ways. By delving into diverse perspectives from the aspects of genre, discourses, and themes, they argue that foreignizing the translation—an act involving manipulation and subversion—may cause a negative stereotypical ideology that confirms and contributes to the misrepresentation of Arabs and Islam.

Farghal and Almanna (2015) start with a historical survey of Arabic translation and then shift their focus to various translation approaches and theories that provide the background to scrutinize the complexities of translation between Arabic and English. Incorporating real-life examples and case studies, the authors also offer insight into the strategies and techniques employed by translators to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers. They argue that theoretical knowledge lays a solid foundation for translators’ performance and facilitates their systematic consciousness of their process. To Farghal and Almanna, translation has become an informed science instead of solely a skill or art.

Almanna and Al-Shehari (2019) take a creative approach by drawing parallels between the art of translation and the art of photography. Through insightful analysis and captivating examples, they uncover the shared principles and techniques that underpin both disciplines. The authors skillfully demonstrate how translators, like photographers, capture and convey meaning, transforming one form of representation into another. In their book, Almanna and Al-Shehari also highlight the importance of the translator’s role as an active participant in the creation of meaning. By examining the photographer’s craft of framing, focusing, and selecting, the author illustrates how translators make choices and exercise their agency in rendering texts from Arabic to English. The metaphor of the translator as a photographer offers a fresh perspective, emphasizing the translator’s creative decision-making process and the significance of context in shaping the translation.

Stanton (2023) gives due credence to Arabic literature’s translatability and views translation as an inevitable step that helps Arabic literature gain its foothold in world literature. With an emphasis on linguistic instead of cultural standpoint, she recognizes the process of unmaking and making the self and the other in the process of translation. She argues that Arabic literature’s literariness can be preserved in its translation and will reveal the similarities and differences between Arabic literature and other literatures. Aligning with Faiq’s observation, Stanton also exposes the common plight of politicization in the translation of Arabic literature and advocates subordinating politics to ethics and aesthetics.

Despite these scholars’ contributions in Arabic translation studies, a notable research gap lies in the limited attention given to the criticism of the source text’s author towards the translation of their works. While translation studies traditionally focus on the accuracy and fidelity of the translated text, there has been less emphasis on understanding the author’s intentions, cultural background, and linguistic nuances embedded in their writing. By neglecting these vital aspects, translations may fail to capture the essence and authenticity of the original work, resulting in potential misinterpretations or loss of the author’s intended meaning. Therefore, this paper intends to bridge this research gap by exploring Qabbani’s defense of the linguistic and cultural specificity in his own poetry and surveying his translators’ inevitable adaptation of this specificity in the target language and culture.

3. The linguistic and cultural bricks of the bridge

If Qabbani realized that not all his readers could enter his world of poetry, why did he foresee that the bridge of translation could not fulfill its function in crossing from the original text to the target text? He emphasized more than once that his work could not linguistically migrate and that the language of his poetry would “lose its protective cover and base.”¹⁰ There is no doubt that a language as grammatically complicated as Arabic confronts various barriers while being translated into a different linguistic system like English. But what hides behind the surface of language, in this case, the general Arabic culture and Qabbani’s pronounced ideology influenced and shaped by his own culture is another unbridgeable chasm. Qabbani repeatedly claimed that cultural inconsistency would degrade the rank of a poet in the target culture and change the original poem into a frozen corpse. It is worth mentioning that this untranslatability of cultural features embodied in the poetry is not particularly restricted to one poet or one period of time but applies to all poets across the Arab world throughout the entire history of Arabic literature. To him, the most direct and noticeable consequence of translating Arabic poetry into other cultures, especially Western cultures, is the unintended indifference of the target text readers to the Arab world and its cultural creations. He writes that “the European cannot see (certain issues) with bare eyes” and that no one would applaud if Al-Muttanabi and Abu Tammam “orated on a Sunday morning at Hyde Park.”¹¹

For Qabbani, then, the deficiency of poetry translation is caused by both linguistic features and cultural background, which conforms with Catford’s theory on translation equivalence: translation equivalence occurs when a SL [source-language] and a TL [target-language] text or item are relatable to (at least some of) the same features of substance, where substance can signify a relatively fixed range of linguistic features, levels and categories, as well as a potentially infinite series of cultural situations.¹² In the rest of this section, I will discuss in detail some potential linguistic and cultural bricks of Qabbani’s translation bridge that may lead to important elements of his work being lost in translation.

3.1. Linguistic bricks

As briefly mentioned above, the semantic meaning of an Arabic text depends to a significant degree on its anfractuous grammar, which under many conditions cannot be perfectly reproduced in English, for example, the fully gendered and numbered nouns and verbs, the nominal and verbal sentences, the politeness indicated by plural nouns while addressing strangers or elders, etc. Any neglect of these features would enlarge the semantic space between source and target texts. With the example below, I merely deliberate the function of marked gender and number in the original text and scrutinize the discordance of these linguistic features in the target text:

Excerpt One¹³

لستُ مُعَلِّمًا..

لأُعلِّمَكِ كيف تُحِبِّي.

فالأسماكُ، لا تحتاجُ إلى مُعَلِّم

لتتعلَّمَ كيفَ تَسْبَح..

والعصافيرُ، لا تحتاجُ إلى مُعَلِّم

لتتعلَّمَ كيفَ تطير..

إِسْبَحي وحْدَكِ..

وطِيري وحْدَكِ..

إنَّ الحُبَّ ليس له دفاتر

وأعظَمُ عُشَّاق التاريخ

كانوا لا يعرفُونَ القِراءَة…

I’m not a teacher

To show you how to love

Fish don’t need a teacher

To learn how to swim

Birds don’t need a teacher

To learn how to fly.

Swim and fly by yourself

Love has no notebooks,

The greatest lovers in history

Did not know how to read

To understand excerpt one, we first need to answer a simple but intricate question: who are “I” and “you?” The English pronoun does not indicate gender as Arabic does in the original text. The “مُعَلِّم mu’allimun (a male teacher)” clarifies that “I” is masculine while the second-person singular feminine pronoun “ِك ki” in “أُعَلِّمَكِ u’allimaki (I teach you)” shows that the addressee of this poem is a woman. Hence, the original Arabic poem tells how a man persuades a woman to learn love by herself because love is innate, just as fish know how to swim and birds know how to fly. Based on the English text, the command asking “you” to “swim and fly by yourself” is the only expression by which fish and birds become the metaphor for “you.” However, the Arabic text has alluded to this metaphor in aid of the plural forms of “fish” and “bird,” which are regarded as third-person singular feminine nouns. Therefore, “birds (she) doesn’t need a teacher to learn how to fly” in Arabic turns into “birds (they) don’t need a teacher to learn how to fly” in English. Similarly, the word “حبّ ḥubbun (love)” is a masculine noun, so “love has no notebooks” is “he has no notebooks,” which insinuates that not every man knows how to love.

What further complicates this case of grammatical inequivalence is that the literary text may also intertextually relate to other texts. Friedrich Schleiermacher writes, “the reader of the translation will be a match for the better reader of the original work only when he is able to sense and eventually grasp with confidence not only the spirit of the language but also the author’s characteristic spirit.”¹⁴ If the impossibility of translating the gender does not completely prevent the target text readers from sensing the metaphor, the inaccessibility to Qabbani’s spirit hidden under the recurring metaphor of “fish” in this and other poems generates not only the author’s helplessness because the linguistic building blocks are absent in the target language, but also the readers’ disappointment. Below is another example of his poetry in which fish represent women:

Excerpt Two¹⁵

كم تشبهين السمكة

سريعة في الحب.. مثل السمكة..

جبانة في الحب.. مثل السمكة..

قتلتِ ألف امرأة في داخلي

وصرتِ أنتِ الملكة

Like a fish,

Quick and cowardly in love,

You killed a thousand women inside me

And became the queen.

In this excerpt, the female addressee that is indicated by the second-person feminine verb “تشبهين tushbihīna (you resemble)” is depicted as a fish that is “cowardly in love.” Obviously, this cowardly fish is the evolvement of that one in excerpt one that sought the lesson of love but was told that love is as natural as knowing how to swim like a fish. Therefore, the novice fish that did not know how to love became “quick and cowardly in love” and eventually turned to be the queen. However, the transformation from a fish to a queen involves killing a thousand women, which implies a barbaric and affectionate trait of women. In another example that follows, this trait is again applied to a fish rather than directly assigned to a female persona.

Excerpt Three¹⁶

هل لديكِ حلٌّ لقضيتنا؟

هل لديكِ حلٌّ لهذه السفينة المثقوبة؟

…

وأكلتِ الأسماكُ المتوحشةُ من لحمى..

ما فيه الكفاية

Do you have a solution

For our problem

For this battered ship

…

And the wild fish have eaten

Enough of my flesh

“Our problem” and “this battered ship” point to a battlefield between the male protagonist, if not Qabbani himself, and his lover. Notice that here she is not a queen anymore but degenerates into a fish among other “wild fish” that “have eaten enough of my flesh.” Also, the usage of either a singular or a plural form of “fish” in different cases reflects how Qabbani distinguishes her love from other women. A fish is like all other fish that know how to swim by nature. This single fish then becomes the queen, but a conflict between the couple degrades this very fish back to merely one of the other wild fish. Thus, whether it is singular (a fish) or plural (fish) also matters in understanding the poem. The incapability of indicating the number in English sacrifices another layer of semantic meaning and the author’s message.

Excerpt Four¹⁷

أريدُ أن أكتبَ لكِ كلاماً

لا يُشْبهُ الكلام.

…

خُذُوا جميعَ الكُتُب التي قرأتُها في طفولتي

وعَلِّمُوني كلمةً جديدَة

I want to write different words for you

To invent a language for you alone

…

Take all the books

That I read in my school notebooks,

But teach me a new word

Reading the two stanzas of the fourth example, we cannot distinguish the gender and the number of imperative verbs, such as “take” and “teach.” According to the context and instinct of many readers, the subject of these imperative verbs should be “you” in the first stanza. Therefore, we may align this excerpt with many others of Qabbani’s that grant women a voice as their power; in this case, the male persona asks his love to teach him a new word so that he can use it to fit the size of his love. However, the Arabic text demonstrably negates this apprehension due to the third-person plural form of those imperatives. Instead of asking the female to “take” and “teach,” it is soliciting an ambiguous group of people to render him this ability to describe her beauty.

As shown above, translating gender and number from Arabic into English demonstrates the obvious semantic gaps that either overgeneralize the author’s expressions, unintentionally distort the author’s intention, or conceal the underground connections between one work and the others. However, a loose cohesion caused by lexical inequivalence is unavoidable since it is due to differences in the grammatical systems between the two languages.¹⁸

3.2. Cultural bricks

Besides the inevitable lexical inequivalence when it comes to translation, the unmatched cultural systems also deteriorate the situation of constructing a bridge from Qabbani’s poetic world to his English readers. His nickname, “The women’s poet,” as well as the eroticism in his poetry, goes astray in American culture because he loses his voice to speak of the plight of the Arab women in their name and voice.¹⁹ Through the translation, his readers hear the sweetness of his words but do not feel the courage he offers his Arab female audience to fight for their rights. He is merely a romantic love poet: no eroticism being felt, no women being inspired. More importantly, these readers cannot seize the political propaganda and his ideology under cover of these sweet words.

On the one hand, the label “erotic poems” is entirely source-text oriented. Since sex has long been regarded as a taboo in Arab society, Qabbani’s poems that have depicted women’s bodies have been castigated by some Islamists as vulgar eroticism. However, for him, eroticism is a positive pursuant—alive with passion and rapture, full of flair and excitement. His sense of feminine beauty is linked with corporeal desire and evokes in him an insatiability for physical love. He speaks not of parting and unrequited passions but of the harmonious union of man and woman, which alone is the source of life and continuity.²⁰ Thus, the eroticism in Qabbani’s work should be seen as a writing technique intended to elevate the position of women in Arab society. In his poetry, women are not inferior to men, but instead, men become the worshippers of womanly beauty. However, eroticism in English poetry covers a broader scope, such as the ventriloquism of sexual objects, the ease with which men are reduced to impotence by the carnality of women, orgasm and melancholy, etc.²¹ The eroticism in Qabbani’s poetry, unfortunately, seems habitual and even monotonous to his English readers. Moreover, sometimes the eroticism used by Qabbani to rebel against traditional values is adapted from the ideology of foreign representations. Thus, his western readers, who have been introduced to both these models and ideology before, may not find his eroticism neoteric. For example, Qabbani adopted the controversial subject found in the 1955 novel Lolita for his own poetry, in which he used the first-person feminine voice. He writes,

My lips have filled out

and the breasts which were flat

two years ago

have today thrust out in pride.

…

Don’t love me like a daughter

Don’t touch me like a daughter

I have turned fifteen.²²

The Arab readers at that time might have been shocked by the bold descriptions about a fifteen-year-old girl’s breast and such a sensitive subject that could not be tolerated in traditional culture. However, western readers are already accustomed to this subject from the novel, and words like “breast” in other English poetic works cannot sense the eroticism in this poem.

On the other hand, the issue of love in Qabbani’s poetry is multi-dimensional, and reading these poems in translation with the impression of eroticism and romance is not conducive to comprehending Qabbani through his work. Modern Arab poets, in general, have viewed themselves as the intellectual leaders of their nations and as agents of transformation and rebirth. Their role was not merely to exist on the margin of history as casual observers. Rather, they felt a responsibility to be engaged and to influence the historical events of their time.²³ As one of them, Qabbani composed poetry that included topics not limited to feminism and eroticism but also extended to politics, especially Arab nationalism. In the meeting with Nayef al-Kalali, who asked for permission to translate his poetry, Qabbani said, “I insist that no translation is made of my political poetry. Why should we show the world our dirty laundry?”²⁴ Nevertheless, as Qabbani wrote about women and Arab politics using the same ink,²⁵ there is no clear boundary between his love poems and political poems. The name of both the translation collections that he approved, Arabian Love Poems and Republic of Love, seems to exclude any of his political poems, but a close examination proves that politics is both explicitly and implicitly involved in these so-called love poems. For example, Qabbani explicitly sighed in the tone of a male protagonist:

Oh my love

What kind of nation is this

Deleting love from its curriculum

The art of poetry

The mystery of women’s eyes

What kind of a nation is this

Battling each rain cloud

Opening a secret file for each breast

Filing a police report for every rose²⁶

Part of the poetic imagery, such as “rain cloud” and “rose,” grants this poem a taste of romance, while another part, such as “women’s eyes” and “breast,” clings to eroticism. However, the overall message of this poem is far more than romance and eroticism but criticizes the nation through a man’s interrogative tongue. Implicitly, Qabbani again disguises himself as an oppressed woman writing “A Letter to An Anonymous Man:”

Sir,

I am afraid to say what I want

I am afraid that if I did, the skies would burn

Your East, my dear sir,

confiscates explicit letters.

It confiscates women’s dreams and aspirations,

keeps women’s emotions under house arrest.²⁷

Whether this is only one female persona complaining about the patriarchy of one man or she is the representative of all women living in a male-dominated nation, more ironically, their voice cannot be heard directly but through a male poet’s writing.

Poetry as a literary genre lies, as regards its use of language, close to the realm of social conversation. The entire presentation draws its breath from the customs of the age and a particular nation, and these in turn find themselves most aptly reflected in its language.²⁸ The Arabic grammatical device first decides the impossibility of translating Qabbani’s poetry into English without sacrificing some layers of meaning. But the cultural substances, including the different cognition of eroticism in Arabic and English culture as well as the inseparable politics in Qabbani’s love poems, further impede the construction of a bridge bringing his foreign readers to him.

4. Translators as the constructors of the bridge of translation

If the peculiarities of the Arabic language and culture become the obstacle to building the bridge of translation, translators, as the constructors, have the rights and obligations to manage them. However, Qabbani, as the original author, never willingly surrendered to his detachment from the translation. He always held an extravagant hope that the bridge of translation would imitate the bridge of his poetry by respecting it as a prototype. In lieu of his translators as critics of his work, he also criticized their translations by saying:

All those who have translated me murdered me, although they didn’t intend to. I must admit to you that none of these translations resembled me, neither from a close distance nor from afar. I wished that the translators had conveyed my flames. To my regret, they only conveyed my ashes. The translators left my heart on the surgical side table and replaced it with a heart of plastic. One day I told one of my translators: I didn’t want you to photograph me. I want you to create me.²⁹

The metaphors of “flames” and “ashes,” and “my heart” and “a heart of plastic” allude to linguistic and cultural deficiency discussed earlier, but his accusation of those translations not resembling him runs counter to his expectation that his translators should create him not photograph him. How could Qabbani insist on a plastic heart working the same way as a real heart and a creation restoring the flame as its prelife? As he writes in My Story with Poetry, his poems are the only photographic image that resembles him.³⁰ Therefore, following Pound and Benjamin’s translation theory, translation as a recreation of the original work lends more power to the translator, and Qabbani’s works helplessly become the dead that calls upon the translation to bring them back to life. On the other hand, imitation of an author is the most advantageous way for a translator to shew himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead.³¹ The translators did not wish to imitate him but created his poetry for a different target audience unacquainted with Qabbani and his works, even at the cost of some sparks in his flame.

Some translation theories, exemplified by Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopos theory, profoundly recognize the pivotal role of translators as active decision-makers who meticulously consider the perspective of the target readers throughout the intricate process of translation. According to Vermeer’s theory, translation as an action has an aim, a purpose. The aim or purpose of a translation is called skopos, and the resulting translated text is a translatum.³² The translatum is based on the original text but also represents the translator’s skopos, which may not conform with the author’s intention. The Skopos theory provides a robust foundation for understanding the multifaceted nature of translation and allows for an exploration of how the translators’ individual purposes and objectives may lead to interpretations that deviate from Qabbani’s original intent, potentially resulting in a transformation of his poetic meaning. This theory’s comprehensive framework, in conjunction with its associated concepts and nuances, serves as a valuable tool for the comparison between Qabbani’s original Arabic text and its English translation. With the enormous system of Vermeer’s Skopos theory as well as the side issues of it in mind, I do not seek a complete comprehension of the translator’s skopos, but the forewords of their translation works should shed some light on most of their purpose of translating Qabbani. In this section, on the ground of the Skopos theory, I would like to argue that the translators’ skopos are relatively diverging from Qabbani’s intention of composing poetry, and they further cause the unavoidable transformation of turning the flame into ashes.

4.1. Bassam K. Frangieh and Arabian Love Poems

As the first English collection of Qabbani’s work, Frangieh states in the preface that “it is hoped that this long overdue book will make Qabbani better known to the English-speaking world.”³³ This initiative to cultivate Qabbani into the Western world, as well as the unspoken initiatives from the publisher, are all seen as acting with a commission in Vermeer’s Skopos theory. The realizability of a commission depends on the circumstances of the target culture, not on those of the source culture.³⁴ However, Frangieh’s translations suffer from many unnecessary sacrifices that do not have much to do with the target culture.

To Frangieh as a translator, the greatest difficulty is Qabbani’s musicality which accounts for his strong popularity and the ease with which his poetry has been memorized and set to music.³⁵ Since the musicality in Arabic poetry is such a grand subject and can be represented in a wide range of characteristics, I shall only focus on the sentence orders and the repetition that contribute to the musicality in Qabbani’s poetry but sometimes get discarded in Frangieh’s translation. For example:

Excerpt Five³⁶

لأنَّ كلامَ القَوَاميسِ مات

لأنَّ كلامَ المَكَاتيبِ مات

لأنَّ كلامَ الرواياتِ مات

أريدُ اكْتِشافَ طريقة عِشْقٍ

أُحِبُّكِ فيها.. بلا كلِمَات..

All words

In the dictionaries, letters, and novels

Died.

I want to discover

A way to love you

Without words.

In this excerpt, the first three lines in the original Arabic text are paralleled with the same style through the repetition of “لأنَّ كلامَ … مات lianna kalāma … māta (Because the word of… died).” However, Frangieh neither abided by the sentence orders nor the repetition. Instead, he assimilated the meaning of the three lines into a whole sentence cut into three separate parts to keep the number of lines unified as the original text. Apparently, the assimilation is not because of the circumstances of the target culture since repetition is regarded as a central part of musicality in English poetry as well.

Secondly, in many other cases, Frangieh has retained the sentence order as well as the repetition in his translation without assimilating them, as shown in this example:

Excerpt Six³⁷

أكْرَهُ أَنْ أُحِبَّ مثلَ النَاس

أُكْرَهُ أَنْ أَكتُبَ مثلَ النَاس

أَوَدُّ لو كان فمي كنيسةًً

وأَحْرُفي أَجْرَاس..

I hate to love like other people.

I hate to write like other people.

I wish my mouth were a church

And my letters were bells

According to Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, the translated literature maintains a central position in shaping the polysystem when it is still “young.”³⁸ As the first English collection, Frangieh’s translation is “young” and supposed to fulfill the lack of a repertoire of Qabbani’s translated text in the target system. However, Frangieh’s unnecessary disregard for musicality is incapable of filling the absence of this repertoire and gives rise to possible confusion in understanding the representation of musicality in the original text. Therefore, although Frangieh’s skopos is to introduce Qabbani to the English audience, his inconsistent decisions left some of Qabbani’s rhetorical flame untranslated.

4.2. Nayef al-Kalali and Republic of Love

Al-Kalali realizes that “to capture all the flavor of these qualities (the splendor of Qabbani’s rhetoric, the luxuriance of his imagination, and the energy and aptness of his diction) in a translation would be an attempt to create an art of the impossible.”³⁹ He by no means wished to imitate Qabbani but to trans-create him with the help of his editor Lisa Kavchak. He hoped that “the wealth of literature Nizar Qabbani bequeathed will remain, through these translations, a source of enlightenment for many generations to come.”⁴⁰ Therefore, al-Kalali intended to overcome certain difficulties during his trans-creating process and hopefully benefit more generations of mostly English speakers from Qabbani’s literature. To illustrate how al-Kalali trans-created Qabbani’s poem, below is an example of how he solved the problematic unsuitable literal translation on the basis of keeping Qabbani’s literary heritage:

Excerpt Seven⁴¹

أوعية الصَّدِيد

”لا.. لا أريد“

”المرَّةُ الخمسون.. إنيَ لا أريد“

ودفنتَ رأسكَ في المخدَّة يا بليد..

وأدرتَ وجهكَ في للجدار..

أيا جداراً من جليد

وأنا وراعَكَ..

Vessels of Pus

Him: No-No, I don’t want to.

For the fiftieth time, I told you, I don’t want-

Her: And you dived into your pillow,

You turned your face to the wall.

You left me behind you seething,

blood bursting my veins

In this excerpt, the quotation marks in the Arabic text indicate that someone is talking to the protagonist of this poem. The second-person masculine verbs “دفنتَ dafanta (you dived)” and “أدرتَ adarta (you turned)” clarify that the speaker of “no-no, I don’t want to” is a man. However, without an equivalent gendered second-person pronoun “you” in English, adapting the quotation marks from Arabic to English cannot realize the same semantic meaning and imply the gender of the speaker. If adding “him” in the translation is due to an unsuitable literal translation, the “her” raises another question. We cannot tell the gender of the protagonist’s voice based on merely this stanza. In fact, the only hint for the gender of that voice comes at the very end of the poem when she says, “نحنُ النساء لكم عبيد naḥnu al-nisāu lakum ‘abīdun (we women become your slaves).” Therefore, what the translator did is to clarify the original text both to make up the semantic shortage and articulate an ambiguity raised by the author. Since a given source text does not have one correct or best translation only,⁴² al-Kalali’s translation cannot be denounced if we see his clarification as part of his skopos, which is to trans-create the original text. However, the problem is that al-Kalali’s reactions facing the same kind of difficulty are desultory. In the following excerpt, al-Kalali fails to recognize the two voices in the poem.

Excerpt Eight⁴³

إلى تِلميذَة

قُل لي ـ ولو كَذَباً - كلاماً ناعماً

قد كَادَ يقتلني بكَ التمثالُ

مازلتِ في فنِّ المحبَّة.. طفلةً

بيني وبينكِ أبحُرٌ وجبال

لم تستطيعي ـ بعدُ ـ أن تتفهَّمي

أنَّ الرجالَ جميعَهم.. أطفال

To My Student

Say to me—even lie—even flattering words,

your muteness is killing me.

You are still an amateur

In the art of love;

oceans and mountains isolate us.

You are still unable to understand

that all men are children.

According to the title “to my student,” this poem seems like another love letter that a male persona writes to a female character. The “student” here does not necessarily refer to a real student of his but an “amateur in the art of love” who is seen as a student by a male love expert. The English translation has nothing but a man’s words encouraging her to state her love, similar to Qabbani’s other poem, “قولي أحبكَ qūlī uḥibbuka (Say I Love You),” that writes, “say I love you… So that I may grow beautiful… Don’t be shy… that is my only chance to become a god… or a prophet.”⁴⁴ However, even for those who cannot read Arabic, a clear look at “قل qul” and “قولي qūlī” will suggest the possibility of a distinction between these two imperative verbs in spite of their same meaning. The “قل qul” in the poem excludes the comprehension that the first two lines are part of the letter since its subject can only be masculine. That means it is the female student saying to her lover, “say to me—even lie—even flattering words, your muteness is killing me,” and the rest of the poem is his reply to her request. Unlike how he rendered the other poem by adding “him” or “her,” this time al-Kalali did not make up for the lexical shortage in his English translation. The inability to translate the female voice contradicts the “trans” of al-Kalali’s skopos, “trans-creating Qabbani.”

Another example of al-Kalali’s inconsistency in his trans-creating skopos is how he identified “certain Arab characters to the English-speaking reader.”⁴⁵ In most cases, he chose to paraphrase these characters. For instance, Antara al-Absi was identified as the Black Knight, and the decision not to foreignize the target text was for the benefit of readable English. One exception is that he retained “Harun al-Rashid” in one of Qabbani’s poems since al-Kalali regarded Yeats’s poem “The Gift of Harun al-Rashid” as a pre-existed introduction of this Arabic character to the English readers. However, by no means could al-Kalali justify that all his readers have read Yeat’s poem before. An inclination to assume so is an advantageous attempt to segregate some of his readers from others.

Since “fidelity” to the source text (whatever the interpretation or definition of fidelity) is one possible and legitimate skopos or commission,⁴⁶ Qabbani’s criticism of translators is not compulsory. Despite their occasional mistakes in understanding the original text and their inconsistency in adherence to their skopos, their success or failure cannot merely be decided by Qabbani but also by the target readers. On the other hand, nobody ever finishes a bridge of translation. Translators are caught in the middle, halfway across, with no way of going back and no certainty of being able to go forward either.⁴⁷ Frangieh and al-Kalali are like their previous peers who have yearned for constructing a bridge, but unfortunately, neither their countless efforts nor Qabbani’s unpractical expectations on them could ensure the completion of this bridge, let alone one as a replica of Qabbani’s bridge of poetry.

5. Discussion

Compared Qabbani’s original writing to its English translations in mainly two volumes—Arabic Love Poems and Republic of Love, this paper first unfolds Qabbani’s viewpoints towards translation and then analyzes the active role of translators in rendering Qabbani’s text with their varied intentions. As Qabbani declares, his poetry is beyond a medium of communication and extends to a carrier of his thoughts, emotions, and fervent beliefs. His desire to preserve the sanctity of his original manuscripts echoes the sentiment of countless authors and poets who yearn for their work to be experienced in its purest essence. Qabbani’s hesitation to have his poetry translated aligns with the concerns of some translation scholars and critics who envisage the risk of misrepresentation and stereotyping in foreignizing translation (Faiq; Stanton).

However, translators like Bassam K. Frangieh and Nayef al-Kalali embarked on a different journey from Qabbani’s. They are motivated by the intention of securing a broader readership for Qabbani, who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of his artistry and the depth of his beliefs concerning women’s rights. These translators are inevitably exposed to the linguistic and cultural barriers that separate Arabic from English. The gender and number in Qabbani’s poems are examples of specific lexico-grammatical structures that decide texture explicitness and hinder Arabic-English translation equivalence (Hatim 99). Moreover, while translating love and eroticism, translators find their pace automatically slows down when mirroring a cultural matter in the target language as they deliberate on the choice of appropriate local strategies (Farghal and Almanna 102).

Based on the familiar metaphor of translation as a bridge, this study delves into the divergent stances between the original author and the translators on the gaps and flaws in translation. Albeit so, these gaps in the translation are closely related to the complexity of poetic expressions deeply rooted in the Arabic language and its cultural connotations. As more English translations of Qabbani’s works appeared in anthologies, dissertations, and online blogs in the past few years, future work could expand the current comparisons and seek to investigate new techniques employed by translators that could possibly eliminate certain linguistic and cultural barriers in Arabic-English translation.

6. Conclusion

By the bridge of poetry, Qabbani welcomed his Arab audience to his poetic world, advocating women rights, discussing the destiny of their nation. He was never eager to have them spoken in another world’s language, but the translators as critics eventually challenged his resistance to being translated. They endeavored to build another bridge: on the one side was still Qabbani’s poetic world but on the other side a broader readership who were unfamiliar with Qabbani as an Arab poet as well as his ideology to speak for women. Qabbani wished to retain the sacredness of his work via his original manuscripts, but the deficiency of linguistic and cultural bricks on this bridge, as well as a different cognition of love and eroticism between the Arabic and English readers, can only make him grieve at the unfinished bridge of translation that he ultimately expected to resemble his bridge of poetry. He lamented that the translations were ashes of his flame, but he also expected his translators to recreate him. He should have known that this bridge of translation by no means is a substitute of his bridge: the languages are different, the constructors of bridges are different, and the readers are different. Therefore, as the author, Qabbani can criticize the translations of his poetry but cannot control how they are received in another culture.

Acknowledgement

Support for open access publication charges provided by IU Libraries.

Disclosure statements

In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and my ethical obligation as a researcher, I declare that I have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tianrui Ma

Tianrui Ma is a research associate at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. in Arabic Literature with a minor in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, an M.A. in Arabic Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a B.A. in Arabic Language and Literature from Xi’an International Studies University, China. His research interests include Arabic and Chinese comparative literature, translation studies, and gender studies. He has presented his papers at major conferences, such as the American Literary Translators Association Conference and the Middle East Studies Association Conference. He is also a published freelance translator of Arabic and Chinese and writes his free verse in multiple languages.

Notes

1 Nizar Qabbani and George Nicolas El-Hage, Nizar Qabbani: My Story with Poetry, 20.

2 Jayyusi, Modern Arabic Poetry, 368.

3 Nizar Kabbani, Nayef Al-Kalali, and Lisa Kavchak, Republic of Love, 18.

4 Qabbani and El-Hage, My Story with Poetry.

5 Ibid., 15.

6 Nizar Kabbani, Nayef Al-Kalali, and Lisa Kavchak, Republic of Love, 220.

7 Qabbani and El-Hage, My Story with Poetry, 25–27.

8 Translation mine.

9 Qabbānī and Suayeh, Poems of Love and Exile, xxx.

10 Ibid., 221.

11 Ibid., 223.

12 “1960s–1970s,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 139.

13 Nizār Qabbānī, Bassam K. Frangieh, and Clementina R. Brown, Arabian Love Poems, 104–105.

14 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” 55.

15 Qabbānī, Frangieh, and Brown, Arabian Love Poems, 42–43.

16 Ibid., 162–163.

17 Ibid., 52–55.

18 Shoshana Blum-Kulka, “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation,” 295.

19 Arieh Loya (1975), “Poetry as a Social Document,” 481.

20 Nizār Qabbānī, Lena Jayyusi, and Sharif Elmusa, On Entering the Sea, x.

21 C.C. Barfoot, “and Never Know the Joy,” x.

22 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 140–144.

23 George Nicolas El-Hage, Nizar Qabbani: Journal of an Indifferent Woman, 13.

24 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 216.

25 Qabbani and El-Hage, My Story with Poetry, 15.

26 Qabbānī, Frangieh, and Brown, Arabian Love Poems, 209.

27 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 160.

28 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” 60.

29 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 219–223.

30 Qabbani and El-Hage, My Story with Poetry, 124.

31 John Dryden, “From the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles,” 40.

32 Hans J. Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,” 191.

33 Qabbānī, Frangieh, and Brown, Arabian Love Poems, v.

34 Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,” 199.

35 Qabbānī, Frangieh, and Brown, Arabian Love Poems, vi.

36 Ibid., 12–13.

37 Ibid., 16–17.

38 Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature Within the Literary Polysystem,” 163.

39 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 11.

40 Ibid., 7.

41 Ibid., 174–175.

42 Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,” 198.

43 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 36–37.

44 Qabbānī, Jayyusi, and Elmusa, On Entering the Sea, 126.

45 Kabbani, Al-Kalali, and Kavchak, Republic of Love, 12.

46 Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action,” 200.

47 Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn, 182.