The Kahlil Gibran Collective's study of the translations of The Prophet has been taken up in the academic literature: Professor Maya El Hajj of Notre Dame University–Louaize has published a paper on the untranslatable in Gibran, drawing on the Collective's findings.
Kahlil Gibran Collective
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KAHLIL GIBRAN COLLECTIVE
By the Kahlil Gibran Collective · Kahlil Gibran Collective · 2019 · kahlilgibran.com
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Contributing writers for the Kahlil Gibran Collective, Francesco Medici and Glen Kalem-Habib, have had their study of the translations of The Prophet inspire an academic paper prepared by Professor Maya El Hajj. It has been published by Academy Publication in Theory and Practice in Language Studies (ISSN 1799-2591), volume 9, number 4, April 2019, under the title "Aporias in Literary Translation: A Case Study of The Prophet and Its Translations."
Medici and Kalem-Habib were glad to see the work academically published and recognised, and thank Professor El Hajj for her achievement.
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Aporias in Literary Translation: A Case Study of The Prophet and Its Translations
Maya El Hajj · Department of English and Translation, Notre Dame University–Louaize, Beirut
Literary translation is one of the most challenging tasks in the field of translation. This paper focuses on the aporias in literary texts written and/or translated into Arabic, French, Italian, and English. I contend that some terms and phrases are difficult to render in the target text. This argument is bolstered by examples extracted from The Prophet of the Arabo-American author Gibran Kahlil Gibran. I selected this particular oeuvre given its immense success in terms of vast cultural diffusion and translation into various languages. Also, The Prophet has been translated several times into the same target languages, in addition to the large number of languages into which it has been rendered. I will discuss the translator's dilemma when undertaking the task of faithfully conveying the aesthetics of the original text into the same, or into the closest version of the original. This paper concentrates on the cultural differences between languages by emphasising untranslatability and various retranslations, and analyses how these elements were rendered into the target culture and language.
Index terms: literary translation, The Prophet, retranslation, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, languages.
The full paper is available from Academy Publication (page 396).
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Maya El Hajj is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Department of English and Translation. She holds a doctorate in Translation Studies from the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, and a Certification of Competence in Teaching Italian as a Foreign or Second Language (CEDILS) from Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her main interest is the effect of culture on languages, and her main teaching area is translation and languages — chiefly English, French, Arabic and Italian. Alongside translation and teaching, she is particularly interested in lexicology and lexicography, a field hardly exploited in the Arab world; her doctoral dissertation, "Étude comparative des dictionnaires bilingues et monolingues," addresses it directly. Dr. El Hajj has lectured in academic institutions in Lebanon, England, Greece, France, Georgia, and Italy.
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