Analysis and Criticism of Ali Abbas Zulaikha's Translation of the Metonymies of Hafez's Poetry

Beyond its literary and artistic values, Hafez's poetry is known as a mirror of Iranian culture and worldview. Therefore, familiarity with it by people of other languages and cultures will open a window to the perception of Iranian art and culture. From this point of view, the quality of the translation of Hafez's poems into other languages becomes especially important. So far, at least nine selected or complete translations of Hafez's poems have been published in Arabic, which shows the appreciation of Arabic speakers for Hafez's poetry and thought. One of the most recent translations is the translation of Ali Abbas Zulaikha. because every metonymy expression, in addition to lexical meanings, also contains cultural, historical, and ethnic attachments, translating metonymies into another language that is current in a different context is one of the difficulties of translation is considered. In this research, which was carried out with the method of content analysis and in a descriptive-analytical way, 10 sonnets of Hafez containing 29 metonymies were randomly selected and analyzed using Kendall and Smith's table of numbers. The results of the research showed that in 8 cases, the meaning of the phrase was translated acceptably, and in 21 other cases, the Arabic translation faced serious problems. It is worth noting that 5 out of 21 cases of wrong translation were caused by misreading the Persian text.