A Critique of the Translation of Arabic Poems of the book Sharh-e Moshkelāt-e Tārikh-e Jahāngoshā Joveini by Ahmad Khatami

The prose of the Tārikh-e Jahāngoshā Joveini is mixed with Persian and Arabic verses that fit the subject in the text. The book has nearly four hundred Arabic verses, and Ahmad Khatami has translated them all in the Sharh-e Moshkelāt-e Tārikh-e Jahāngoshā Joveini. His translation of these verses is, in many cases, inadequate, incomplete, and sometimes completely wrong. In this paper, we divide these errors into four groups: syntactic errors, morphological errors, inadequacies, and lexical errors, and with critically and descriptively analyze, we have reviewed the verses that fall under each group. We have tried to show by referring to the Court of Poems, reference books and Persian and Arabic dictionaries how the translator made a mistake in each of these cases and what was the source of this error. The translatorchr('39')s syntactic and grammatical errors are often the result of not recognizing the syntactic role of words and phrases, not recognizing the tense of verbs, the root of verbs, and the form of verbs. And his inadequacies and ambiguities are due to his lack of reference to the Court of Poems, reference books, and authoritative cultures. We have quoted every Arabic verse from its original source in his Court of Poems or from reference books and we have expressed Ahmad Khatamichr('39')s translation of the verse and after reviewing his translation and showing his mistakes, we have provided the translation of our proposal from the verse. We have tried to make the proposed translation free from these slips and more precise and accurate.