Self-translation of Poetry: Is It Possible to Yield Quality Results?

چکیده

No subject matter has a shortage of translated texts; nonetheless, self-translations are quite scarce. Ignoring definitions in other disciplines, in the field of Translation Studies, self-translation is referred to as an original writing being translated by the author himself/herself—leading to the author and the translator becoming the same person. As rare as self-translations are, research onto such texts is understandably even rarer. To fill in this gap, this article picked a self-translated poetry book as a case study. On the one hand, self-translations can be analyzed liked any other translated text; accordingly, the selected poems were examined according to Lefevere's approaches of translating poetry. On the other hand, Grutman's description for self-translator's bilingualism and the power relations between the two languages were also employed. It was concluded that since this self-translator was also the poet, so having intellectual license over the material, he knew his content best. As a result, any changes he made in the process of translation were justified.