On Impostures

 Cooperson’s introduction revealed so much more about Impostures than I would’ve got from reading the text itself. I think that the cultural context and history that he provided truly enhanced my understanding of the reading, which I found tedious to decipher. Whilst the translation by Cooperson was so clearly in English, the work seemed almost foreign to read. The glossary shed a lot of light on the language used and it was interesting to note how the majority of vocabulary was recognised to be typically unfamiliar to the reader. The theory of translation that Cooperson states seems immaculate and whilst the resulting translated work showcases so much of his notions concerning translation, it seems distant due to its complex language.

The transduction of dialects seems to be less efficient than he proposed and the entire piece loses the tradition fluidity that a poem has. However, I feel that Cooperson is of course completely aware of the complexity in his finished work and that he perhaps chose to translate the source work in this fashion as it pays respect to the his personal theory of translation and maintains a very literal language transfer through cultures rather than grasping the essence or feeling. I was left with this feeling of intangible roughness that doesn’t usually precede poetry in my experience but I am sympathetic to the fact that the work is being converted from the incredibly deep and complex Arabic language.

Diya