Metanarrative Translating of Poetry: Striking the Balance between Meaning, Genre, and Language Musicality

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the investigation into English and Arabic poetic/expressive language functions through proposing a new approach to the translation of the genre of poetry, both in theoretical and practical terms. Given the fact that the translation of poetry is known to be an arduous translational task, as authorities and, further, practising translators emphasize, the researcher here argues that dividing poetic texts up into their intralinguistic-extralinguistic components on the levels of genre, meaning and form, in addition to categorizing them are believed to be of great avail when translating poetry lyrically into a target language (TL) as a ‘metanarrative’ (an explanatory product here) reported about a ‘narrative’ in the source language (SL). This, the researcher has argued, can help strike a balance between the poetic language musicality and the levels of ‘meaning’ and ‘genre’, where all are to be approached in terms of the interdisciplinarity that marks translation, generically, as a branch of knowledge, taking into account the present paper provides practical examples of English poetry with their respective Arabic translations, recited/sung by the researcher himself (documented throughout this paper via soft/online audio material), hence the practicality and credibility of the theoretical part of the research. The paper also holds both the text (in writing) and its recitation (in audio) as one indivisible translation unit/entity, yielding, in turn, a two-layer metanarrative translation (as documented via multimedia links). This has been taken as central to the research hypothesis and, then, proved as a paramount researching result of the translational ‘narrative’/‘metanarrative’ relationship within the translation process⸺ to say nothing of a proposed interdisciplinary text-music semiotics perspective.