Critical Assessment of Poetic Imagery Translation in Nizami’s “Leili & Majnun” by James Atkinson

Poetry translation involves cognition, discourse, and action by and between humans and textual ac-tors in physical and social settings. The aim of this study was to find out to what extent the non-native translator of Nizami Ganjavi’s “Leili and Majnun” could preserve the poetic imagery in its English translation. To this end, an innovative taxonomic model, which could investigate the De-scriptive, Figurative and Symbolic aspects of poetic imagery, was presented as a three-dimensional theoretical framework. The information adopted from the content analysis of the source text revealed that the visual imageries occurrences in descriptive category, metaphor and then allusion in figura-tive and love in symbolic classification were the most applied poetic imagery in the source text. The descriptive statistics obtained from the tabulated data of this research indicated that in general James Atkinson could preserve the Persian poetic imagery as well which seems very high for a nonnative translator in introducing Persian poetry to other nations. However, the only weakness was his igno-rance of the mystical thoughts of Nizami, which needed a hermeneutic understanding of Sufism and Mysticism, which have a deep root in the history and culture of Iran.