The translation of Persian literary masterpieces represents a valuable field of academic research. Numerous classical Persian texts—including Ferdowsi's Shāhnāmeh, Hafez's Divan, Rumi's ghazals, and Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr—have been translated into multiple languages and have attracted substantial attention from Orientalists and translators. While traditional translation studies have focused on ambiguity, double entendre, and multiple interpretations in the source texts, this research concentrates specifically on errors resulting from difficulties in reading Persian poetry and script.
This challenge affects both Persian speakers unacquainted with classical literature and, more significantly, non-Persian speaking translators. The present study examines the following works: the story of Rostam and Sohrab, 79 ghazals of Hafez, the story of Sheikh San'an from Dick Davis's translation of Mantiq al-Tayr, 400 Rumi ghazals translated by Arberry, 48 Rumi ghazals translated by Nicholson, and the ghazals of Hafez common to the translations of Bly, Lewisohn, and Arianpour.
To precisely identify where translators erred in reading Persian poetry, we employed back-translation after presenting the original poems alongside their English translations (with one Arabic translation included). We categorized the translation errors into three types: basic linguistic errors, interpretive errors, and cultural errors. Beyond merely documenting these errors, we investigated their underlying causes, which include: the Persian script's insufficient graphemic representation of certain phonemes, incorrect parsing of syntactic structures, and fundamental cultural differences.