Poetry Translation and Translation Criticism in Translation Journals of the Republican Period

Abstract

With a linguistic point of view, this article investigates the various aspects of poetry translation in Turkish Literature within the Republican Period. Our aim is to discuss the various manifestations of poetry translation in terms of the translation criticism and our discussion is based on the data taken from the three journals of translation published in the Republican era: Tercüme (1940-1966), Yazko Çeviri (1982-1984) and Metis Çeviri (1989-1992). Our findings indicate that literary clerk put a great emphasis on the poetry translation and express their views on translation via these journals. Accordingly, the poetry translation requires a distinct semiotic mechanism in order to transfer the linguistic material which is a combination of semantic, pragmatic, stylistic and rhetoric features from the source text into the target text. Our findings also show that the main point of discussion in the journals in terms of translation criticism is the (lack of) equivalence between the source text and target text, the specific linguistic devices to be used in the translation and the translation of stylistic features. It is evident from the discussions that the translation criticism in this period has limited contribution to the field due to fact that it approaches to the translation not as a linguistic process but an end product. Key words Translation, translation criticism, poetry translation, Tercüme, Yazko Çeviri, Metis Çeviri