Music as a Compensator for Semantic and Rhythmic Mismatch in Poem Translation

Poem translation is controversial, as it challenges the principles of traductology by casting doubt on whether language is at all translatable. A poem is an aesthetic experience in the realm of literature. Moreover, it creates excitement and emotion out of "meaning", because it involves a certain music. Rhythm is a common concept between poetry and music, indicating a deep relationship between the two realms. In this paper, we use this relationship to translate Mowlana's poems from Persian to French. More specifically, where the translated poem is orally represented, we propose accompanying it with music to compensate for shortcomings in meaning, form and rhythm in the translated poem, these being a result of basic differences between the two language systems. Finally, we have shown that the music-poem combination makes the same impression on the speaker of the destination language, as it does on the speaker of the original language.