Under the patronage of the Dean of the College of Arts, Prof. Dr. Majid Abdul Hameed Al Kaabi, and within the cultural program of the College of Arts, Dr. Ahmed Al-Bahr gave a lecture, entitled "To What Extent Poetry is Translatable", in an online meeting on the platform of the cultural unit in the college, on Sunday evening 2/1/2022, at 7 pm.
The lecture talked about the possibility of translating poetry from and into Arabic. Dr. Al-Bahr emphasized the difficulty and sometimes the impossibility of translating poetry by non-experienced people, including the poetic images that it reflects and the feelings it generates in the recipients. To convey this idea, he used a group of poems by prominent poets such as Muhammad Al-Jawahiri and Muzaffar Al-Nawab, which he translated into English. Dr. Al-Bahr also emphasized that the translator must be professional in order to choose between localization and foreignization.
It is worth mentioning that al-Bahr is an Iraqi expatriate poet, civic activist, translator and academic who now lives in the United Kingdom and teaches at York University. He has several books dealing with the translation of texts between Arabic and English.
