Oh gosh Ms Fakhreddine was so incredible ! I wish I had presented on her and skipped discussion to speak with her. I thought she was so eloquent and made me think of poetic traditions in ways I hadn't even thought to think of. I thought her perspective on the Arabic tradition of poetry through time was so beautiful--art is always a product of the world it's created in, and all art is political, but the best art is monumental in whatever time it's created in, relevant and applicable and understandable within and outside of historical contextualization. What she said about translating specifically Arabic poetry, and how with translations of Arabic often the translation becomes the original and its significance, carving out the original author's place in the culture of the language they're translated into. I asked her a question about translating meter and rhyme and she gave a really interesting answer, where she talked about how translating Arabic meter into English meter would give the poem connotations that weren't there in the original. That really had me thinking about how much I liked David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh, and what to make of it now with my new information.
While reading our articles it occurred to me, thanks to what Ms Fakhreddine said about the connotations of things that aren't there in the original, that translating foreign dialects into the somewhat equivalent native dialects could be indicative of things like classism, racism, etc. when those themes weren't originally present, like Brodovich said. I liked that Lung's paper stressed the importance of societal context, like class status, ethnicity, and region, to emphasize the importance of being careful when using Brodovich's proposed fixes to dialectical difficulties in translation.
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