“Flight” Across Languages: Comparative Analysis on Translations of Yahya Kemal Beyatlı’s “Uçuş”

Abstract

Poetry translation, which requires consistency in both artistic and semantic terms, has been one of the most controversial areas of translation studies, creating various obstacles to theoretical and practical discussions. While translation studies in the 1950s and 1960s were more linguistically oriented and focused on the language level, a cultural approach came to the forefront in the 1970s. Lawrence Venuti’s strategies of “domestication” and “foreignization” in translation are notable examples of this approach. Analyzing the translations produced by a Turkish translator (S. Behlül Toygar) and native English-speaking translator (Roger Finch), this study aims to determine which translation technique each translator primarily uses and the extent to which their translational decisions reflect domestication or foreignization tendencies. Moreover, the study comparatively examines how the translators dealt with the lexical, syntactic, semantic, phonological, and graphological elements of the source text. By comparing these linguistic and stylistic categories, the study identifies the parallels and discrepancies between the two translations, assesses how well they capture the aesthetic and semantic elements of the original poem, and highlights the gains, losses, and changes in poetic form and meaning in the translation from Turkish to English. It was concluded that poetry translation often requires a compromise between meaning, form, and culture, rather than achieving complete equivalence, and that Toygar and Finch, instead of copying Beyatlı’s poem “Flight,” recreated it within new linguistic and cultural contexts.