A Review of the Art of Translation

This book is a review of the couplets of Baba Tahir, a famous poet of ancient Iran, as translated by Edward Heron Allen in 1901. Allen did so without access to the authentic phonetic tables of the poet’s age, which is admirable in its own right; because some dialect words are specific to the speakers of the same geographical region, based on the phonetics associated with them, and despite the written or phonetic similarity with the dialect words of other regions, they have different meanings. Background about the challenges of poetry translation is given in the introduction, and then, the poet’s life, character and couplets are described in detail based on native and non-native sources. A selection of literal translations of dialect words based on the theories of Venuti (1965) and Baker (1992), and the implied meanings of the couplets, are also reviewed. This book is useful for English students who interested in poetry, and other students who study the translation of literary texts.