Mashhady, Habibollah

The present paper attempts to explore FitzGerald's overall approach to translation by examining his translated works and particularly by focusing on his translation of Khayyam's Rubaiyat. Khayyam Rubaiyat is selected as the text to gather data and it is compared to its English translation by FitzGerald in order to identify the strategies he used in translating it into English. In order to do so, first this paper traces translation theories common in Victorian era and the extent FitzGerald adheres to them. Second it discusses translation of poetry and potential obstacles inherent in it according to form, meaning, culture-specific terms and the role of interpretation in poetry translation. Then it focuses on Khayyam Rubaiyat translation and identifies strategies used in its translation which ranged from addition, selection, omission, domestication to foreignization, all of which transformed Khayyam into a Epicurean western- poet philosopher. It further concludes that FitzGerald has employed the same strategies and theory in all of his translated works. In addition to Persian language and literature, It is useful to examine his approach to translation in his non-Persian translated works like Greek literature and make a comparison among Persian and non-Persian translations.

comparative studies, culturalism, translating,translation theory, victorian poetry

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