Arberry’s translations and compare it to Barks’s version of the same poem

Choose Arberry’s translations and compare it to Barks’s version of the same poem. Identify Barks’s significant changes to Arberry’s translation and analyze and evaluate the effects of these changes

Please read Rumi, Arberry and Barks.docx
and Jalal al-Din Rumi. The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition. Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, Reynold Nicholson. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
And two sources were above two only.

For Tuesday, we will continue to compare the scholarly crib translations by A.J. Arberry with the corresponding versions by Coleman Barks. Please read the following poems from the selection of Arberry’s translations (found in the Resource section on Oncourse) with the poem from The Essential Rumi by Barks:

13 / 20 / 248 / 166 / 50 / 142 / 227 / 260 / 265 / 394 / 64 / 301.

While Arberry is translating literary works, his English renditions of Rumi’s ghazals cannot be called literary translations. In other words, Arberry, by his own admission, does not attempt to achieve any artistic effect in his translations and shows none of the conscious shaping of language that is characteristic of poetry. One of the participants at the conference on the translation of pre-modern Persian poetry that I attended in Boston this week put it, "Arberry changes poems into ethnographic documents, perhaps the worst fate any poem can suffer." On the other hand, Barks has no direct access to the Persian, but devotes all his attention to creating coherent, artistically shaped poems in a modern American idiom. His versions deviate noticeably from Arberry (who has already changed the Persian text significantly). Barks often creates poems that have been praised for their concision, memorable phrasing, and effective structure (and have proved remarkably popular among a broad and highly educated readership), but sometimes at the cost of substantially changing important aspects of Rumi’s spiritual vision.

Among the techniques that Barks uses to adapt Arberry’s version are the following: adding titles, creation of stanzas and new visual structures on the page, condensation and omission, transposition or shifting the position of key images, and addition of new material. Barks’s versions almost always use fewer words than Arberry’s. This can contribute to much greater clarity, create a stronger rhythmic movement of the language, and leave more room for the readers’ imagination to operate. At the same time, the result can sometimes be an over-simplification, leaving out aspects of Arberry’s versions that indicate the original cultural context of the poem or eliminating aspects of the poem that might be unpalatable to a contemporary American audience.

For your final paper assignment, I would like you to select one of Arberry’s translations and compare it to Barks’s version of the same poem. Identify Barks’s significant changes to Arberry’s translation and analyze and evaluate the effects of these changes.

Remember that neither Arberry nor Barks are transparent windows onto the Persian text; Rumi’s poems, for example, are written according to strict patterns of rhyme and meter that neither translation attempts to capture, and his poems are almost always far less verbose than Arberry’s versions would suggest. As any experienced translator will assure you, all translations attempt to balance losses and gains in moving between languages, and we can expect to find both in Barks’s revisions of Arberry. Your comparison between the two versions of the poem, Arberry’s and Barks’s, should attempt a balanced assessment of both the losses and gains.