1.

Introduction

1. Informational Background

Translatability of Poetry

Translatability of poetry has been hotly debated by scholars and linguists. There are two opposite
views in the topic whether or not poetry can be translated: the one is on the one hand that poetry is
translatable and, as evidence, that many cultures has taken poems as foreign but not as translated, such as
English readers of Catullus or Realke, Chinese readers of Keats, or Arabic readers of Homer's Iliad &
Odyssey.
Still, successfully translated poem does not leave the reader to perceive that a translation has occurred,
and only when the poem conforms to such caliber is deemed a translation (Baker & Saldanha, 2020, P.
410).

Translation and Literary Translation: Concept and Nature

Translation is to make meaning (Halliday, 1992) from a different source text (ST) of a different
source language (SL), integrate such meaning into a target text (TT) of a different target language (TL),
and retain the stylistic and esthetic effects of that original meaning, the same effects about which literary
translation is primarily concerned. More exactly, literary translation is type of translation that is in
specific quest for molding both the conventional esthetics of the "literary style" and the normal cultural
peculiarities of a different SL into a TL. The literary style forms the basis of literary translation, leads to
constitution of poetic meaning- as opposed to the scientific, universal and invariable meaning of a
non-literary text- and contrasts the non-literary or scientific style that is mainly about pure lexical
meaning (Anani, 2003, p. 34).

The literary translator is thus challenged to predispose the target audience to be as much impressed by
the artistic style of the ST as the source audience has been. Naturally, literary translation deals with
various literary genres (e.g. verse, drama and fiction), and in this respect verse is indubitably the literary
genre that poses the greatest challenge to the literary translator. Namely, the rhythmic, rhetorical, tonal
and cultural specificity of verse incurs considerable efforts for linguistic and cultural equivalence.
Moreover, culture is an integral, organic and inseparable part from language, and the literary style
epitomizes the manifestation of the cultural elements in language, hence the taxing conveyance of the
foreign authorial culture to lay audience (Anani, 2003, pp. 6-7).