Analyzing Poetry Translation Strategies in Sohrab-e Sepehri's Poems

Translating poetry has been subject to debates for centuries and is still causing a lot of controversies. Many scholars claimed that poetry is untranslatable and it is needless for the translator to try because when poetry is translated, it may lose its aesthetics (Amirshojai & Khalilizadeh, 2015). In this connection, the present work considered the English translation of Sohrab-e-Sepehri's poems in terms of "Simplicity and Simple Living". More specifically, it investigated the strategies applied in translation of Sepehri' poems regarding Lefevere's model. Also, the extent of "simplicity and simple living" notion was analyzed in English translation of poems. For these objectives, a set of Sepehri's poems have been selected and analyzed in order to find out the strategies used by translator. The data were collected and evaluated based on Lefevere's model including eight strategies. Apart from the strategies as "material translation", "poetry into prose", and "rhymed translation" which have not been used at all by translator, the least frequent strategies were "phonemic translation" and "blank verse translation". However, the most frequent strategy in translating the mentioned poems was "simplicity" strategy. Therefore, it can be concluded that the notion of "simplicity" was presented in a high degree by the translators. Recognizing the most appropriate and correct equivalences for these terms is one of the noticeable tasks of the translator. It can be said that the translated poems may not create the same response and effect as evoked by the original text in the audience and the translated version leads to vagueness.