Research In Idioms And Images Translation In Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry

Mahmoud Darwish is the most prominent and influential Palestinian poet in the Arab world.As an iconic and humanist intellectual,his local voice has been manifested and recognized as "the Voice of Palestine"(?)and "poet of humanity" since his subjective aesthetic is always imbued with his universal spirit and vision.In 1960,Darwish produced his first poetry collection which was entitled Wingless Birds.Since then,Darwish has published more than thirty poetry collections along with dozens of essays.His major poetry collections have been translated into more than forty languages that would have a global reach.Undoubtedly,Darwish has been recognized as a great world poet whose poetry has been inscribed in the world cultural scene as being a true voice of the wretched of the earth,love,exile,and humanism.Being an iconic national poet of Palestine goes in line with his highly elevated stance as a great universal poet.In November 2016,China Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House published a book entitled A Lover from Palestine:Darwish Poetry.The book is translated by Xue Qinggue and Tang Yin.They select eighty six poems from nineteen poetry anthologies of Mahmoud Darwish.Interestingly,this book comes into being as the first translated poetry collection in Chinese.This thesis is intended to examine and analyze the idiomatic and imagery translation more concretely through scrutinizing the original Arabic text of Mahmoud Darwish and the Chinese translation in A Lover from Palestine.This thesis,in particular,constitutes three major chapters.The first chapter is concerned with introducing the autobiography of Darwish along with a detailed account of his experience and growth as a poet.The second chapter explores the way in which the idiomatic translation in A Lover from Palestine has been formed and manifested in various ways.Chinese translators often tend to use the most common four-character idioms in Chinese in order to translate the poet’s Arabic phrases and lexicons.However,such a translation method is determined by dominant characteristics of Chinese per se.Drawing on the findings of this chapter,one can argue that such a method has a genuine and substantial advantage in terms of the visual effects animated by the Chinese translation.There are a few cultural idiosyncratic traits that exist in Chinese culture,but they do not exist in the original text.Therefore,the strength and weakness of rendering these cultural idiomatic expressions are premised on the Chinese method of translation.Moreover,the third chapter sheds light on the imagery translation in A Lover from Palestine.Darwish relies heavily on a few symbolic techniques and imagery that are often imbued with mythology,ethereal,and experimental grounding.Such images project the catastrophic representation of his subjective and collective life.In his poems,Darwish uses,for instance,the image of olive trees as an ecological symbol that stands for his unreconciled resistance against the Israeli invasion.It also addresses his legendary love for Palestine.Chinese translation,I would argue,does justice to the intricate representation of these images and their intercultural boundaries that exist in Chinese and Arabic.