Author:
Abstract
Popular poetry has a deep existence in the Iraqi society. It is a great source of the Iraqi heritage and a reliable record of many events in its history. It is famous for its prominent poets and unique poems. One of these Iraqi popular poets was Mulla Abood Al-Karkhi. He gained the skill of choosing and selecting, from the colloquial language, words of clear and significant meaning. Al-Karkhi is famous for his great poem “Al-Majrasha”. Al-Majrashah depicts the suffering and the social injustice, the rural working women endured in the period of 1920s. This paper is an attempt to study and analyse this poem and its English translation stylistically within the field of foregrounding as the main characteristic of stylistics that makes this poem a unique one. Semantic deviation (including the figures of speech), parallelism, and repetition are to be investigated in three examples from Al-Majreshah with their English translations. This study investigates the effects of foregrounding in the original texts and to what extent its tools are maintained in the translation. This paper concludes that the rich devices of “foregrounding” found in the source texts are maintained in the target texts. The slight lexical and semantic mismatching between the source texts and the target texts is attributed to some cultural problems in understanding the dialect of the poem by the researcher and the translator.
Keywords
Abstract
Popular poetry has a deep existence in the Iraqi society. It is a great source of the Iraqi heritage and a reliable record of many events in its history. It is famous for its prominent poets and unique poems. One of these Iraqi popular poets was Mulla Abood Al-Karkhi. He gained the skill of choosing and selecting, from the colloquial language, words of clear and significant meaning. Al-Karkhi is famous for his great poem “Al-Majrasha”. Al-Majrashah depicts the suffering and the social injustice, the rural working women endured in the period of 1920s. This paper is an attempt to study and analyse this poem and its English translation stylistically within the field of foregrounding as the main characteristic of stylistics that makes this poem a unique one. Semantic deviation (including the figures of speech), parallelism, and repetition are to be investigated in three examples from Al-Majreshah with their English translations. This study investigates the effects of foregrounding in the original texts and to what extent its tools are maintained in the translation. This paper concludes that the rich devices of “foregrounding” found in the source texts are maintained in the target texts. The slight lexical and semantic mismatching between the source texts and the target texts is attributed to some cultural problems in understanding the dialect of the poem by the researcher and the translator.