The Translator-text Interaction Based on Gadamer’s Theory of Fusion of Horizons: A Case Study of Translations of Romantic Poetry into Persian

Abstract

Love of poetry has a long history among Iranians, so is the case with translation of poetry in their recent attempts. Thus, the significant number of translations has been made from Western poems. British Romantic poetry, as one type of Western poetry, has been translated since the beginning of poetry translation in Iran. This paper aims to investigate the translations of the British Romantic poems diachronically, the translations published in the 20^th century, before the Revolution of 1979, and synchronically, the Romantic poems translated in the 21^st century, the post-Revolutionary period. To fulfill the purpose, Schäffner’s theory of translation competences was applied to reveal which century met them more adeptly. For the linguistic competence, besides the text analysis of all translations, the number of the parts of speech of four translations attributed to a poem was counted and compared to the number of the original poem to verify the result. The analysis of the competences, as one of the tools of translation assessment, proves the attainment of Gadamer’s theory on the fusion of horizons for translators. The examination indicates that the translation competences are more developed in the translations of the 21^st century. Therefore, in this century, translators achieve the fusion of horizons more effectively, and the translation trend of British Romantic poetry has improved.

Keywords: Poetry translation, British Romantic poetry, Translation competence, Fusion of horizons, Persian literature, The Revolution of 1979.