The translation of metaphor from Arabic to English in selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish with a focus on linguistic issues

The translation of Arabic literature into English is a wide field of study. The present study focuses only on one aspect - the translation of metaphor in selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish. Arabic is widely known as a strongly metaphorical language, and Darwish’s poems as part of Arabic literature hold many embedded meanings and metaphors that play a major role in building up their artistic flavour. In many translations of Arabic poems, metaphors and other figures of speech are mistranslated and, consequently, misunderstood by target text (TT) readers. This affects the meaning, form, imagery and moral/theme and leads to a distorted and inferior copy of
the original poem. The present study aims to analyse the Arabic-to-English translation approaches adopted in rendering metaphors in poetic discourse, with specific reference to ten of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems. Six of the poems chosen have been translated more than once. This approach to selection will provide a platform for a comparative/contrastive analysis between different translations. The other four poems are translated only once. In fact, Darwish is a poet of universal significance whose message transcends the personal to the public, and he is well known for using many types of metaphors in his poems to relay certain messages and images to express his themes in an indirect way. The researcher will analyse each metaphor in the source text (ST) and its translation(s)
to investigate whether or not the translators have succeeded in conveying the metaphor and message accurately, the type of resemblance embedded in the original poems, as well as the effect of the new metaphor on the reader of English. The study
makes use of the fields of text linguistics, lexical semantics, and contrastive linguistics.