Enjambment as a complicated concept in poetry translation

Abstract

Translating poetry has always been a challenge for translators. Peculiar poetic devices such as enjambment add to the difficulty of such an endeavour. However, there has not been much analysis of the effect of enjambment in the translation of poetry. The two types of enjambment, prospective and retrospective, are analyzed in this study, and special attention is paid to how translators deal with these issues in order to illustrate how poems with unfinished lines are treated. For this purpose, Orhan Veli Kanık's poem Dedikodu and the first stanza of William Blake's The Tyger are studied, along with their translations by two different translators. Based on a comparative assessment, the study shows that a wider and deeper understanding needs to be developed for the proper comprehension of the functions of the enjambment use. Given that enjambment is an intentional act, it has been observed that any attempt to violate or ignore the concept essentially destroys the original poet's voice. The study has clearly shown that the overall sound aesthetics and the deliberately formulated volume of the lines are disrupted, and these lines are replaced either by lines that are combined into a single line or by clarified lines that say much more and take up much more space in the line. Except for the linguistic necessities, the study proposes to preserve the effect of enjambment as much as possible to echo the macro-frame of the poem, which represents a vertical unity in which several lines are both morphologically and syntactically linked.

Keywords

• poetry translation
• enjambment
• poetic sound
• volume of lines
• vertical unity

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