Description
W. B. Yeats: Unrequited love and translator gender identity (Eleni Nasi)
William Butler Yeats has been widely recognized for his love poems. The study attempts to highlight how unrequited love in the poetry of Yeats is rendered in Greek. More specifically, it selects and analyzes three target versions of two poems (When You Are Old and No Second Troy) related to the theme of unrequited love, focusing on the themes of bitterness and expression of love. The study designed a questionnaire addressing Greek native respondents to evaluate potential variation in the type and intensity of feelings shaped in Greek target versions of the three poems. Findings show that (a) the earliest version is the closest to the ST and (b) out of the other two versions of the poems, there was a type of fluctuation rather associated with the gender of the translator: male translators seem to emphasize bitterness and empathy with the poet, while female translators mostly highlighted expression of love, demonstrating a kind of female solidarity towards the poet’s beloved. The research highlights parameters, such as time and translator gender, which affect meaning transfer on the theme of unreciprocated desire.
