A Postcolonial Analysis of Arberry’s Translations of Selected Poetry from Persian into English

Over the past few centuries, the function of translation has become wider and in addition to linguistic aspects, ideological, economic, cultural, and political factors have dominated the process of translation. Since translation is not merely a linguistic and neutral task and for too long, it assisted superpowers in colonizing weaker nations, the relationship between the original text and the translation requires considerable investigation under the postcolonial approach. It is proven that there is a special relationship between ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘translation’ and many postcolonial translators and authors transmitted their own cultures in their works; therefore, this paper is focused on the postcolonial analysis of the English translations of five Persian poems translated by the postcolonial orientalist, Arthur John Arberry to see whether he has made any attempts to replace Western concepts with Eastern ones or not. Accordingly, the intended English translations have been selected from Persian Poetry: An Anthology of Verse Translations (2008) edited by A. J. Arberry and corresponding Persian poems have been collected from various books. The results of the analysis of the data obtained from the corpus revealed that in transferring some specific concepts in the Persian poems, the translator ignored Persian-Eastern identity, thus making the poems westernized for the readers.