A Survey of Poetry Translation According to Antoine Berman's (1985) Text Deformation System: A Case Study of English Translation of Book II of Mathnavi Manavi

Abstract

The present study sought to investigate deviation in translation of poetry based on Berman's (1985) model of “Text Deformation Systemâ€. Primarily, English translation of one hundred fifty lines of Book II of Rumi's Mathnavi, translated by Nicholson, in 1926, were analyzed based on twelve deforming items of Berman's model and compared to Persian lines corrected by Nicholson as the source to find out the deformations. Then, chi-square test was conducted to investigate the differences among the frequencies of occurred deformations. The results revealed the deviation, especially syntactic deviation, of poetry translation based on Berman's model. There were statistically significant differences among the occurred deviations. The findings also revealed that Rationalization, Destruction of rhythm, Destruction of linguistic patterning, Destruction of underlying network of signification, and Expansion were the most frequent items among  the twelve deforming items.