A Review of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience" in Persian Translation

Abstract

—All who research and study about William Blake's works more or less know about the nature of his most salient work, Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence . The Songs of Innocence tries to reflect child's innocence and ignorance of worldliness. They focus on childhood happiness and improvisation. Those who work in the field of literary translation are aware of those limitations and bounds which a translator may face with, (sociolinguistic matters, cultural bounds, discourse issues…) none of which will lead us toward rejecting the essence of translator and translation. As Robert Frost says: "in a literary translation the only thing we miss is the poem itself" and even the best translators can not be aware of the exact philosophy of the poem, because it's just in the mind of poet and inaccessible to others. But all in all we translate poems and we try to share experiences. This paper is the result of years of reading and introspecting in to William Blake's Song of Experience and of Innocence. While translating the collection to Persian the researcher encounters with number of questions, which she tries to present answers for them. So a sort of comparative, contrastive analysis between original English version and its Persian translation appeared. In this paper the writer chose 3 sample poems and their translations in order to discuss translation issues she encountered with reading and translating Blake. The results showed key factors in translating Blake are: symbolism, original spelling and punctuation, knowing about author's biography.