Selective Translation of Poetry: Conditions and Requirements

The translation of long poems tends to be such a demanding job that some translators may content themselves with renderings of a selection of the poems’ lines. Such “selective” translations have to meet certain conditions without which they are expected either to be far removed from the true themes and purposes of the originals, despite the fact that they may be apparently faithful to the literal meanings of the words, or, at the very worst, to be distorted versions. Having examined an example of Persian translation of a few stanzas from In Memoriam A. H. H., a long poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, The present paper is going to enumerate the necessary conditions for the sound selective translations of poems: the adherence to “linguistic” and “temporal” contexts of the original poem. The disregard for these conditions in the Persian translation has caused it to be a far cry from what the poem really is about, and none of the translator’s comments has compensated for the loss either. Finally, there comes another Persian translation of the same stanzas which has met, along with the aforesaid conditions, other requirements that constitute collectively “the sufficient condition” for a successful selective translation of a long poem; this versified translation seems to convey, to some extent, the formal aesthetic aspects of the original too.