The act of English translators' reading of the symbols of Hafez's poems

Habibi, Parisa; Ramazani, Abolfazl

doi:10.30466/jispll.2025.55665.1016

The act of English translators' reading of the symbols of Hafez's poems

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Parisa Habibi ¹ ^¶
Abolfazl Ramazani ²

¹ Graduated from Shahid Madani Azerbaijan University

² Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature English Language and Literature Department Faculty of Literature and Humanities Shahid Madani University of Azerbaijan, Tabriz, Iran

10.30466/jispll.2025.55665.1016

Abstract

Hafiz's poems were introduced to the Western world by Orientalists from the middle of the 18th century, and many translators sought to translate and understand these poems, and in this way tried different methods. Apart from the success rate of translators in conveying the concepts of Hafiz's poetry, they themselves were from the first audiences of Hafez's poems in the West, and how these poems are understood and interpreted is a significant issue. This article deals specifically with how the important translators of Hafiz's poems perceive the frequently-repetitive symbols of these poems based on the elements of theory of reception. According to the theory of reception, every literary text has gaps or voids within itself that characterize the literary text against other texts. According to this theory, in dealing with these gaps, the audience mixes what they have received from the text with what they have in mind and fills these gaps.The symbol is one of the significant semantic gaps in Hafiz's poems, without which it would be difficult to understand Hafez's worldview. Here, the readings of three personal and important symbols of Hafez (Pire-maghan, Rend, Kharabat) in the translations of prominent English translators of the 19th and 20th centuries are evaluated, and the result obtained shows that most English translators have been active readers in reading the symbols of Hafiz's poems and by combining their mental contents with the symbolic element, in most cases, they have highlighted only one of the semantic spectrums of the symbol and in most cases, they have eliminated the aesthetic gap of the poems. ‬‬‬‬

Keywords