Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 5

Translating Poetry into Indigenous Languages: The Case of Igbo Language Ijioma, Patricia Ngozi Abstract- Poetry belongs to the literary genres. It is characterize d by imagery, flower y expressions, emotions, proverbs, idioms etc. Most times, it is connotative and subject to many interpretations. Each poem conveys a particular message, formulated in words specific to a language and culture. Poetry, therefore, is deeply rooted in culture and no two cultures are the same. Translating a poem from one language to into the framework of a totally different language gives cumbersome results. All these factors make the translation of poetry an uphill task and requires a great deal of rigor. Translation of poetry is a recreation of the source language (SL) poetry in the target language (TL). The dilemma of a translator of poetry is then how to recreate the poem of the source language to the target language while maintaining the structures of source language poem: rhyme, rhythm, meter etc. The structural differences between languages constitute another bottleneck for the translator. The challenges become more complicated when working with two languages, English and Igbo languages that are very wide apart in areas of development, structures, worldviews and cultures. How do we strike a balance between the semantic content and adhere to the aesthetic form? The thrust of this paper is to explore the possibility of translating two English poems into the Igbo language, analyze the problems encountered and suggest ways to make the translator’s job less cumbersome. Keywords: culture, fidelity, poetry, literary translation. I. I ntroduction ranslation is not a simple search for lexical equivalents to the words in a text. The poem belongs to the literary field which involves the translation of the three major literary genres namely, prose, poetry and drama. The translation of a poem is very difficult because of certain specific elements: the use of particular language; cultural differences and the complexity of the language. Language of poetry differs from common linguistic usage because: poetry often employs words excluded from common usage and has its own special grammar. (Riffaterre: 1978). Literary translation must reflect the imaginative, intellectual and intuitive writing of the author. That is why the main task of the translator is to reproduce the rhetorical and aesthetic value of a poem. (Landers, 2001) A poem gives rise to multiple interpretations. The first task of a poetry translator is to produce a living rhythm, without thinking of imitating or restoring that of his foreign model. A poem is created in a specific society or culture with objects, symbols and ideas which have a different function in another society and culture. Idioms, images and poetic metaphors are deeply rooted in culture, which are therefore the literary and aesthetic outcomes of a language. To translate them from English to Igbo is a very difficult task. The translator of an English poem into Igbo is therefore faced with problems of meaning and style; structure, rhyme, meter and stanza, poet tone and retain the contextual meaning of the source language in the target language. The dilemma of a translator from English to Igbo is above all, how to represent as precisely as possible these characteristics in his translation and at the same time have the same aesthetic effect. In addition to retaining these characteristics, the translator is required to produce a text which is also a poem in the target language. II. D efinitions of T erms a) Literary translation Literary translation is simply the translation of literary texts. A literary text is more difficult to translate than other texts typology because of its specific characteristics: flowery, aesthetic expressive, figurative etc. It is connotative and deeply rooted in culture. Literary translation lends to multiple translations. b) Poetry Poetry is the imaginative expression of strong feeling, flowery and often loaded with imagery. Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision. (Dylan: 1994). According to Raffel (1988), a poem “represents writing in its most compact, condensed and heightened form, in which a language is predominantly connotative rather than denotative, in which the context and form are inseparably linked. It is also informed by a musical mode”. Pratima (2012) agrees with Raffel that a poem is known by its musical code. Poetry is filled with meaningful words and that, the meaning of these words can be interpreted based on various points of view. T © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue V Version I 93 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A Author: National Institute for Nigerian Languages, Aba-Abia State, Nigeria. e-mail: ngolemmy@yahoo.com The purpose of our work is to translate the two English poems My Mother by Ann Taylor and Rain by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Igbo, while as much as possible retaining the characteristics of the poem. We equally analyze the source and target texts based on the structure, the problems encountered and the way forward.