Effectiveness of ‘Imitation’ as a Poetry Translation Method: A Qualitative Study on the Transposition of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Enoch Arden’ as ‘Sudō Sudu’ by Sāgara Palansūriya in the Sri Lankan Context

ABSTRACT: The fundamental task of translation is to transpose unknown facts into known by givingknowledge or an aesthetic enjoyment for another audience of readers. In translation, expecting perfection isimpossible as there is no single language in this world that shares the same features with another language. Thisscenario can be clearly epitomized in the literary translation of which poetry translation is the most problematicand debatable sub-field. Due to the difficulty of poetry translation, many experts believe that ‘poetry isuntranslatable.’ and therefore, translators use different strategies to convert the aesthetic values in a poem intoanother language. Accordingly, this qualitative study was carried out to determine the effectiveness of one suchstrategy namely ‘Imitation’ proposed by John Dryden and its suitability in the Sri Lankan context. In this regard,the narrative poem, ‘Enoch Arden’(1864) by Alfred Lord Tennyson and its Sinhalese imitation,‘Sudō Sudu’(1948) by Sāgara Palansūriya were referred. They were compared, and their similarities and dissimilarities wereseparately categorized using the content analysis method. In conclusion of this study, it revealed that thoughthese two poems contrast in terms of words, sense, figurative language, patterns of sound, structure (number ofstanzas and lines), settings, and names of the characters, and etc., they share the same set of themes such asfriendship, love, separation, bereavement, and struggle of life, plot, characteristics of the characters, and etc.Palansūriya has produced ‘Sudō Sudu’ by taking these general themes of the original into account and recreatedit appropriately for the Sri Lankan context following completely different poetic techniques and backgrounddetails. Finally, though the target poem cannot be recognized as a complete transcription of the original, theusage of the method of ‘Imitation’ helped the target audience to enjoy the general aesthetic value included in theoriginal indigenously.

Keywords: Aesthetic Values, Imitation, Poetry Translation, and Untranslatable