Translation of Islamic Arabic Poetry: A Two-Stance Methodological Framework

Abstract

This study investigates whether it is possible to translate Islamic Arabic poetry, as a universal literary religious genre, into English to a high level of quality. A global-local translation framework (Halimah, 2020) is applied to the translation of Imam Ashshafi’ee’s[i] poem “الرضا بقضاء الله”/ “Accepting Fate with Pleasure” into English, where a methodological collaboration between a bilingual translator and an English poet manifests a two-stance methodological framework. The results, along with the qualitative and quantitative analysis of poetic extracts used in this paper, indicate that this framework has resulted in improving the quality of Islamic Arabic poetry translation. The translated materials proved to be ‘novel and appropriate’, achieving a very high 90% of approximation of the original text against ACNCS criteria. This framework can also be applied by translators of other literary and non-literary texts to bring more structure and clarity to the discipline of translation.

[i]Muhammad bin Idrees Ashshafi’ee (DoB:150H/767A.D died in 204H/820A.D.) The founder of the Sunni School of Law مذهب الشافعية