FitzGerald’s Translation of the Mantiq-Ut-Tayr: A Colonial Approach towards Metrics, Textual Rhythm, and Rhyme Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mantiq-Ut-Tayr[1] is a collection of mystical poems composed by Farid ud-Din Attar in 1177 in Iran. He was a doctor, druggist, perfumer, and at the same time a Sufi in his ideas. In 1857, the British poet and translator, Edward FitzGerald, introduced this collection of couplets to England for the first time. As a Victorian translator, he attempted to colonize the Persian text and recreate Attar’s rhythmic pattern in his translation. In other terms, he tried to introduce the Persian Metrics of the twelfth century into English literature of the nineteenth century. By introducing Persian fixed metric patterns into English literature, one may wonder how FitzGerald’s invention affected the norms of the Victorian poetry. Has the British translator become successful in recreating the close correlation, which exists between rhythm and the underlying significance of the Mantiq-Ut-Tayr in his translation? By applying the theories of scholars in linguistics and translation studies, such as Derek Attridge, André Lefevere, Antoine Berman, Susan Bassnett, and Harish Trivedi; this research seeks to investigate the way FitzGerald rendered the Persian Masnavi—rhyming couplets—and the genre in established English norms. Thus, the present study might provide an interesting research field for developing a postcolonial methodology with regard to the rendition of the Mantiq-Ut-Tayr’s rhythm and rhyme in English. In fact, this research attempts to evaluate the change of meaning, comprehension, and above all the reception between the Persian text and the English translation of Attar’s masterpiece. Keywords: exception, metrics, rhythm, colonial approach, translation, Mantiq-Ut-Tayr. [1] The conference of the birds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".