According to an Italian idiom, Tradutore, traditore (“The translator is a traitor”). This kind of treason, I believe, can be seen most clearly in poetry, and can be doubly pernicious if mistakes are not weeded out by two people working together, each representing their own native language. Here I shall present two examples of mistranslation, of the kind which can happen to any overly confident and zealous translator, and which can best be avoided if the translated text is carefully examined by native speakers of both source and target language.
         The October 1989 issue of the Hebrew journal Moznayim - published by Union of Hebrew Writers - featured, on p. 25, two poems by Óaha MuÎammad ÝAli (“There is not” and “Sail of the Coming Torment”), translated into Hebrew by Miriam Sasson. The translation suffers from a number of errors which cannot be ignored. Thus, for example, in the first of the afore-mentioned poems the Arabic word “Îayya” (= “snake”) was translated into a word meaning “creeping animal”, and the word “sanÁsil” (= “low stone walls”), explicitly chosen by the poet in order to evoke the look of a local village, was rendered as “hedges”.
          The translator also misunderstood the meaning of the Arabic word “maÒÐÒ” (= “twine”) and translated it “sugar cane”, apparently misled by the basic meaning of the root, which is “to suck”. The word “sugar cane” in colloquial Arabic, “qaÒab al-maÒÒ” does indeed contain a word from the same root.
          In the second poem the Bedouin word “lithÁm” (= “veil”) was translated into Hebrew as “nosebag”, apparently out of the misconceived thought that it belonged to the horse mentioned in the previous line. This completely misses the point here, namely the image created by the poet of the indignation caused by the tresses of “al-baÔÙf” (=Valley in Lower Galilee). The translator ignored the poet’s use of the valley’s name as a symbol of adherence to the soil , and thus emptied the line of its deeper meaning (“the tresses of the valley”).
          The name of the flower “al-shÁbb al-ÛarÐf” (a kind of flowers ) was translated literally (= “gentle youth”), instead of by the Hebrew name of the plant. The translator did, however, explain in a note that this is the name of a colorful flower.
          Turning now to another case entirely, Dr. ÝAbd al-WÁÎid LuÞluÞa has pointed to a number of mistranslations in Adonis’ and YÙsuf al-KhÁl’s Arabic version of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, published by ShiÝr Publications. They not only left out the poem’s very important introduction but also, for example an amusing translation- that of “swallow”, which they understood as the act of swallowing, instead of the correct meaning of a bird. The words of the woman who took pills to abort her fetus was translated as the words of a man who wants to arouse himself, quite contrary to the original meaning. ( another examples in his book ( ÝAbd al-WÁÎid LuÞluÞa : Al- Ard l YabÁb , Al Mu`sasa l `Arabiyya , Beirut – 1980 , p p 66 – 83 .).
          I can only conclude that every translation must be carefully checked and reexamined. Otherwise the translator’s misunderstandings will remain in the text. This may do the original author an injustice, since the reader will not be able to distinguish between the erroneous printed text and the original.
Cooperation is therefore important if “treason” is to be avoided.
 

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