Mā Kāna Li-Yaf al: Reflections on its Syntactic Structure and Persian Renditions

This article studies the syntactic structure of the generic construct “mā kāna li-yaf‘al” and the way in which Persian authors have accounted for it in their translations. A simple syntactic analysis of the expression reveals the following information: mā is the particle of negation; the subject of kāna is the implied pronoun huwa and its predicate is omitted and based on the meaning of the sentence is assumed to be murīdan, munāsiban or another similar word. The lam in li-yaf‘al is a genitive-marking preposition (harf al-jarr). The present tense verb is put into the accusative case by the accusative marking (suffix) –an. The present-tense verb is then implicitly transformed into an infinitive (by –an) which coupled with the prepositional prefix lam amounts to a full-blown prepositional phrase (al-jārr and al-majrūr) which is associated with the omitted predicate of kāna. The most accurate and representative translation therefore would be hargez (Persian for never). Of all the translators surveyed in this article, including Mojtabavī, Makārem, Khorramshāhī, Garmārūdī, Ostād-valī Safavī, Karīm-Zamānī and Rezāī-Isfahānī, only the last one had used our recommended Persian equivalent for the Arabic structure (with the exception of Yūnus:37 and Yūsuf:76). By contrast, Mojtabavī, Garmārūdī, Ostād-valī and Safavī never used hargez as the equivalent of their choice.