Abstract:

This article presents a stylistic comparison of W.B. Yeats's “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and its Turkish translation “İçine Doğmuş İrlandalı Tayyarecinin” by a Turkish poet-translator, Can Yücel, in order to explore the nature and significance of Yücel's work of translation. James Holmes's 1980 concepts of “act of poetry” and “metapoetry”, and the discussions of Lawrence Venuti 1995 concerning the translator's visibility in the translated text provide the main conceptual framework within which I examine the translated poem as an instance of an encounter between the Irish and Anatolian landscapes that manifests the “passionate” involvement of both Yeats and Yücel in these landscapes. Thus, the descriptive/comparative study offered in the article examines the stylistic features of the translation to understand how Yücel has transformed the original poem, in other words, Yeats's “act of poetry”, into a “metapoem” in Turkish, that renders not only Yeats's but his own “act of poetry” visible as well. The study is conducted in line with Raymond Van den Broeck's model of translation criticism and reviewing, which regards the translated text as both a representation of the source text and a text in its own right.