İbrahim Şaban

The Language and Culture Club of Istanbul University’s Faculty of Letters and İADER hosted Prof. Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, then head of the Department of Arabic Language Education at Gazi University, in the fourth event of their series of talks on Arabic language and literature. In his lecture “Translating Classical Arabic Poetry”, moderated by Prof. İbrahim Şaban, Suçin drew on his translations of the Seven Suspended Odes, one of the immortal texts of classical Arabic poetry, to discuss questions of poetry translation in general and of translating classical Arabic poetry in particular.

Likening the structure of the classical Arabic qasida to that of the classical symphony, Suçin argued that the odes known as the Muʿallaqat are dynamic, polyphonic texts that move from atmosphere to atmosphere, as a classical symphony does, and that elements of harmony in the poems — internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance and semantic parallelism — function like the instruments of a symphony.

Explaining how translation is present between the lines of the sacred scriptures, Suçin devoted part of his talk to the views of Western figures such as Octavio Paz, Roman Jakobson and Georges Mounin, and of al-Jahiz, the polymath of the Abbasid period, on whether poetry can be translated. Borrowing the term wahdat al-wujud (the unity of being) from the Islamic Sufi tradition, he suggested that the human spirit ultimately points to a single universal spirit — what might be called a “unity of spirit” — and that this is one of the signs that translation is possible.

Noting that losses may be unavoidable by the very nature of the work as poet and translator create their texts, Suçin said: “What matters in poetry translation is how the losses are managed. The master translator is the one who can manage these losses in a balanced way.” Classifying the existing translations of the Muʿallaqat, he said they could be examined in two categories, “prose” and “poetic”. In prose translation, he argued, form is sacrificed to content, there is no concern for economy of words, and the translation is didactic; poetic translation, by contrast, he defined as “a type of translation that tries to strike a balance between content and form, pays attention to economy of words and seeks to create an aesthetic effect.”

Suçin’s talk can be watched below, and the text of his presentation can be downloaded from the link beneath the video.

Source: İADER İstanbul. The lecture and the presentation are in Turkish.