Magin_Edward-thesis

6. Application and concluding remarks
In this chapter, I apply what I have learned through the analysis in Chapter 5 to
the translation of a short poem into Northern Kurdish, specifically, the Bahdini
subdialect, while also drawing from § 2.2 on translating poetry. The poem I chose to
translate is Allah by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). I was not able to
ascertain why Longfellow chose the name Allah, the Arabic word for ‘God.’ The poem
Allah was appreciated enough by George Whitefield Chadwick (1854-1931) that he set it
to music and published the song in 1887 (Chadwick 1887:2, 3). I thought the poem ideal
to translate as it was written in quatrains, similar to verse forms found in the Neoclassical
poems in the corpus. Additionally, I liked the subject matter of the poem and
found the content and grammar simple enough for producing a translation.
My reasoning for translating Allah into verse form is two-fold. First, after
considering what others have said about translating verse poetry―specifically, those
mentioned in § 2.2―I find myself in agreement with Holmes (1988), Thorley (1920), von
Willamowitz-Moellendorff (1992), Boerger (1997 and 2009) and others who would
prefer to see the metapoem matched to an appropriate form in the receptor language. This
was what Holmes proposed in the discussion of his meta-literature model, presented in
Figure 1 in § 2.2.4.1, where options for interpretation of a poem are scaled against options
for poetic translations. In this model, the metapoem lies at the intersection of
interpretation and poetry. The closest interpretation option is the production of a prose
translation. This option was considered by Holmes to be insufficient, because a strictly
prose translation―as opposed to prose poetry―is not poetry. On the other side of the
metapoem is the imitation of a poem, which is viewed as being a poem, but one that
strays too far from an ideal interpretation of the original.
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