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instead of using a word for ‘sight,’ as I did in my more literal version, she changed the
verb to vekim, ‘open,’ as opposed to using the possessive verb ‘have.’
Shushi’s poem in (352) certainly has more appeal than my version in (351), which
is to be expected by an ideal translator of poetry. The receptor language is Shushi’s native
tongue, and given her years in the US and level of education, she fulfills the requirement
that a good metapoet know the source language very well. Shushi also fulfills the third
ideal requirement of a metapoet: she herself is a poet. In the discussion of her poem, I
have shown that many of the poetic devices she employed were also employed by poets
represented in the corpus. Other translation decisions were found to be in accord with
Boerger’s (1997, 2009) principles for translating poetry. Her decision to change the
image in the line, “that here in sadness beat”―line 4 of the second quatrain―may be
considered by some to be too free and, therefore, an imitation. However, given the
difficulty in translating the line, I personally feel that she conveyed much of the sense of
the original and that her translation of the line should be considered, minimally, a
“creative” translation. The poem as a whole is a true metapoem, bearing the hallmark of a
poet.
6.3 Concluding remarks
The purpose of this thesis was to analyze a body of Northern Kurdish poetry,
identify poetic features contained therein―consisting of variants from normal
speech―and apply what has been learned to the translation of poetry into Northern
Kurdish. The process of choosing poems for the corpus presented opportunities to
interview three poets and an editor of poetry. These interviews allowed me to gain an
emic view on Northern Kurdish poetry, which added important information to the study.
Noteworthy findings include the following: On the phonological level, I identified
several types of rhyme, including multisyllabic rhyming sequence (see § 5.3.3.1.3), where
multiple syllables are rhymed. I also identified instances of consonant and vowel feature
rhyme―where poets capitalized on the similarities between consonants and vowels when
forming end rhymes (see § 5.3.3.1.5). Allowance for the use of such poetic devices