Archaism in Poetry Translation: A Case Study of the English Translation of a poem of Shamlu

According to Leech, what create poetry are the linguistic deviations a poet manipulates in his/her poetry.Linguistic deviations are related to the issues of form and style.Since the subject of style is very important in poetry, the translator of poetry should do his/her best to convey the style together with the content into his/her translation. Concerning linguistic deviations, the translator should also pay attention to these stylistic features and try to convey them as far as possible. As one of linguistic deviations, archaism plays an important part in Shamlu’s poetry. In other words, archaism is one of the dominant and determining factors of Shamlu s poetic style. This study, thus, has investigated the English translation ofa poem of Shamlu by Mahmud Kianush in this regard.It was found that although archaism is dominant in Shamlu’s poetry,most of the instances of archaism are ignoredin the translation. Stylistically, then, the examined translation is defective.

Keywords:

Archaism , Linguistic deviations , Poetry translation , Style , Shamlu