A Quick Look at Ahmad Pouri and His Translation
Maryam Akbari
1 August 2005
On August 1, 2006, Hopkins Club hosted Ahmad Pouri, one of the witnessed a lecture delivered by Ms. Maryam Akbari, an MA holder in English literature and one of the permanent members of the club, on “Capitalism and Modern Art”.
At the commencement of her speech, she briefly introduced some of the major characteristics of “modernity”. These specific characteristics, as many critics have discussed, caused a culturally radical and artistically avant-garde reaction toward “modernity,” which has been frequently entitled as “modernism.
On November 27, 2006, the Hopkins Club hosted Ahmad Pouri, contemporary poet and translator, and witnessed a lecture delivered by Mr. Ali Sobati, an MA holder in English literature and one of the permanent members of the club who through his review had a quick look at Ahmad Pouri and his translations in the field of poetry.
At the commencement of his speech, he briefly introduced Mr. Ahmad Pouri, as one of the well known translators in the area of poem translation who is known by his outstanding translations.
Ali Sobati, club member and public relations manager in his lecture about Ahmad Pouri and his translations said” Although Persian language doesn’t have much eco-political support , therefore, it doesn’t have a specific and obvious subjectivity and relation to the discussions of people as Poal Duman, Derrida, Walter Benjamine and Andru Benjamine who have reviewed the translation subject and the point can be emphasized that translation is kind of thinking and it maybe is a continuation of the original work.
He said “at least in theoretical aspect, in each text every word by itself and in the company of other words produces a very complex and intricate chain of associations and denotations and in addition to that, regarding the approach of language towards the syntactic rules and accents and phrases which are used, the applied language works as a continuum of signs so it gets the translator to encounter with a vast world of meanings and semantic choices.
Therefore, in such a process, the translator can’t be anymore faithful to either the original work or encoding in the translation which is liked and emphasized outstandingly by the famous translation theoretician “Yujin Naida”.
Also, it should be considered and attended that, translation as any process which leads to the creation of a different text, has collaboration with literal tradition but important point is that every poem is inevitably in collaboration with its traditional and historical background.
Mr. Sobati in his introduction of Ahmad Pouri and the review of his works in the field of poetry and translation said “Ahmad Pouri who is known with his poem translation in Iran, has been totally different in his approach regarding this matter during the past two decades and still is.
In this process he embarks on the subjects that unfortunately are neglected by poem translators. He mainly has a vertical view towards the text that he translates rather than a horizontal one and what is important is the text as a whole”.
He said “it is not exaggeration if we say that Pouri’s translation of Pablo Neroda’s poems ,( published by Cheshmeh) is the best collection of translated poems during the recent decades. Among his works, here we can name "the soldier’s love".
Ali sobati continued his lecture through reading some of Pouri’s translations of Pablo Neroda, Carl Sandberg, and Orhan Vali and a long with that focused on artistic delicacies of his work.