Multilingualism in Poetry: How to Translate Sayat`-Nova

The 18th-century Georgian-Armenian poet and bard Sayat‘-Nova is well known amongst scholars of Armenian language and literature as the author of numerous poems composed in the Tiflis-dialect of Armenian. Next to the idiosyncrasies of this dialect, however, the language used in Sayat‘-Nova’s poetry is replete with lexical material from many other languages widely spoken in the Caucasus and its environment, particularly Georgian, Azeri Turkish, and Farsi. This is unsurprising: the Caucasus is a highly multilingual region and Sayat‘-Nova a multilingual poet. Next to the work of Charles Dowsett (1997), which treats mainly of the life, poetic topics, and style of Sayat‘-Nova, little further literature is available as concerns his language; even an English translation of his poetry is as yet a desideratum. This paper addresses the lack of a modern translation that does justice to Sayat‘-Nova’s language. It proposes two manners in which his multilingual poetry can be translated without losing entirely the richness and expressiveness of his language: a multilingual approach to the target language environment (combining English as the matrix language with French elements); and a rendition by materilingual estrangement, using typographical means to translate originally non-Armenian elements.

Cite as: Robin Meyer. 2022. Multilingualism in Poetry: How to Translate Sayat`-Nova. In Federico Alpi, Robin Meyer, Irene Tinti, David Zakarian (eds.), Armenia through the Lens of Time. Multidisciplinary Studies in Honour of Theo Maarten van Lint. Brill.
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