Stylistics and Translation: A Descriptive Analysis of the Translation of Iqbal’s Jawab-e-Shikwah “Answer to Complaint” by Pritchett

Abstract

Translation not only involves transferring meaning but also encompasses the conveyance of style. The study aims to analyse the role of style in poetic translation. It investigates which stylistics devices are employed at the phonological and semantic levels in the creation of the poem, and how these are transferred in the translated work. Further, it has been investigated which translation strategies are used by the translator. For this purpose, Iqbal’s poem Jawab-e-Shikwah and its translation “Answer to Complaint” by Pritchett have been selected. This analysis is conceptually grounded in a synthesis of stylistics and descriptive translation studies (DTS). The study reveals that Iqbal’s poetry is fraught with stylistic devices- rhythm, rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration, metaphor, hyperbole, and allusion. Despite employing literal translation, transliteration, sense-for-sense translation, compensation, and deletion, the target language rendition exhibits a loss of rhythmic and musical qualities. He has tried to compensate the stylistic devices of alliteration, assonance and consonance in the translation, but mostly he has deleted these devices due to structural differences in the source and target languages. Furthermore, among the entire stylistic devices used by him, allusion has made the translation more problematic one due to its embeddedness in the source language (SL) culture.