2.

Rationale

It seems therefore clear that the cultural specificity of the literary style is starkly evident in
mock-heroic verse, or in Arabic "‫( "اﻟﺸﻌﺮ اﻟﻤﻠﺤﻤﻲ اﻟﺴﺎﺧﺮ‬vide Wahba, 1974, p. 328). To demonstrate,
mock-heroic poem is a satirical poem in which the poet applies to produce the effect of satire a special
technique that employs grand style and lofty language which inappropriately extols and esteems a figure
that is in fact low, ridiculous and inferior. The special technique employs a few and limited number of
Homer's epic conventions (e.g. extended simile, epithet, Muse, etc.), and this is particularly why
mock-heroic (always adjective) distinguished from mock-epic, the proper noun that refers to the same
technicality but full, extensive employment of the Homeric conventions.

Due to this fact, for especial want of equivalent Arabic poetic type to mock-epic, and additionally
for reason of reference to contextual phenomena that are stimuli to satire yet are foreign to target
audience, mock-heroic poems in general and Mac Flecknoe in particular is a problem for Arabic
linguistic equivalence. John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe presents to the reader a satire on Thomas Shadwell
and his questionable artistic allegiance to Ben Jonson's outstanding comedy of humors, both culturally
peculiar to the English audience that conditionally has adequate learning about the drama and literature
at their time (Greenblatt & Abrams, 2006, p. 2111).

3. Significance

In addition, Dryden has on numerous occasions made uncomfortable allusions to English literature
(e.g. playwrights, characters, dramas and poets), several allusions to the Bible and Roman History, and
number of geographic references as well as citation of terminology and jargon. Owing to this culturally
challenging allusions and references, Mac Flecknoe constitutes a dual problem for Arabic translation: the
problem is to imitate the general fundamental esthetics of verse and is added to the additional particular
problem of bridging the huge cultural gap of the Arab audience impeding contextual mechanics of
Arabization.

4. Hypothesis, Problem and Hypothetical Questions

That poetic meaning varies as per person, place and time can hamper the definitive deduction that a
word is problematic. That is, individual perception, etymological uses and situational usage result in
variability and non-universality of poetic meaning, therefore when the problematic account (vide Mac
Flecknoe and Arabic Translation, 2022, p. 3) approaches the esthetic of a word or a lexical element of a
figure of speech, the judgment whether a semantic- hence cultural- problem is decisively manifest or not
will be difficult to make. Nevertheless, the fact that the subject of Mac Flecknoe is a single and definitive
target and the further fact that the esthetic constituents of the poetic meaning have a likewise single and
definitive end goal (i.e. satire) both reduce the problematic variability of poetic meaning to the least
degree. That is why an element of the poetic diction of Mac Flecknoe will, to a safe degree, be judged
problematic.

A duo of hypotheses, then, can be established:

 The manner in which Mac Flecknoe is poetically dictated produce transpositional problematics,
specifically for Arabization, inasmuch as a cultural distinction is invoked.
2