Translating Instagram Poetry into Arabic: A Case Study of Rupi Kaur

Abstract

This thesis is a case study in literary translation studies. It consists of a creative component comprising 70% of it, which is an anthology of contemporary English Instagram poetry translated into Arabic, and a critical component comprising 30%, which is a commentary outlining the linguistic, literary, and cultural aspects promoting my translation choices. Born in Punjab, India in 1992 to Indian parents, Rupi Kaur emigrated with her family as a child to Canada where she became a leading Instagram poet, illustrator, and stage performer. Kaur has received little academic attention to date and has remained undertranslated in Arabic. Instagram poetry is both very widely accessible and culturally specific. Literary translators and academics have demonstrated how deeply intertwined language, multimodality, poetry, and culture are. Translating Kaur's poetry equivalently is a complex task, both culturally and linguistically. Therefore, this thesis seeks to study the challenges of translating contemporary poetry in a multimodal context and provides both translators and scholars with a discussion of negotiating verbal and non-verbal meanings across languages and cultures. By providing an annotated translation of Milk and Honey, The Sun and her Flowers, and HomeBody in Arabic, accompanied by a critical commentary, I endeavor to show how, despite all the restrictions imposed by the field of multimodality and literary translation, as well as the difficulties of poetry translation, a translator can still produce a well thought-out and reliable translation that conveys the literary cultural and visual aspects of poetry, and more specifically of this young best-seller contemporary Instagram poet. This project makes three significant contributions. First, I introduced a new phenomenon of literature writing in the social media era. Second, I offer a case study of Rupi Kaur and her literary contributions in the field of poetry writing. Finally, I make a twenty-first century author’s words available in Arabic with a scholarly apparatus for the first time. This thesis consists of three main parts alongside the introduction. The first part is contextualizing Kaur, her books, and some other popular Instagram poets (instapoets). In the second, there is a review of literature about poetry translation and multimodality theories. The third part includes the translations themselves as well as annotations followed by an analysis of Zina's translation of Milk and Honey into Arabic