How can classical Arabic poetry be translated without betraying the spirit or literal meaning of the original text? How to convey the text from one language to another and, even more importantly, from one poetic language to another, when they belong to such different and distant traditions across space and time? To answer these questions, we will take a closer look in an exercise of comparative poetics which in some cases exemplify the history of translating Arabic poetry into Spanish: that of the Count of Noroña and his Poesías asiáticas puestas en verso castellano (Asian Poems translated into Castilian verse) (1833) and the epitome of literary Arabism in our country, Emilio García Gómez, and his highly acclaimed anthologies of poetry from Al-Andalus.  We will then come to those of Modest Solans Mur and the reading proposed by Granada artist Leonor Solans in The Market with no Buyers:  Treasures of Al-Andalus, concluding our reflection by attempting to examine what poetry can be translated and how to convey it into other artistic languages.

Fernando Andú
A literary critic, Arabist and poet, Fernando Andú Resano (Zaragoza, 1965) contributed to the “Arts and Letters” insert in the daily newspaper Heraldo de Aragón from 1989 to 2001. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Arabic Philology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2004. As a researcher, he formed part of the unfortunately discontinued Institute of Islamic Studies and the Near East of Zaragoza (IEIOP) and from 2010 through 2016, he taught Spanish Language and Literature at the School of Arts, Letters and Humanities at the Université de la Manouba in Tunisia. In 2008, he published the essay The splendor of poetry in the “taifa” of Saraqusta(Zaragoza, Mira Editores), and in 2013 he last poem book to date came to light, Diferencias (Differences, Zaragoza, Eclipsados).