ABSTRACT
Sulaiman al-Bustani was poet, translator, and politician, and published his articles in magazines, including al-Jinan and contributed to Butrus al-Bustani's encyclopedia. After an excursion into the two ages of paganism—of the Arabs and the Greeks—and the epics of the moderns, Bustani returned to poetic inquiry with discussion of truth and figurative language. He discussed variation on poetic meanings through metaphor, simile, metonymy, and ornaments; problems of imitation, plagiarism, and coincidence of ideas; as well their changes due to differing modes of civilization. Two natural barriers which were also substantial impediments to the poetic translation of the Iliad in the early eras [of Islam] may be no less—perhaps even more—serious than religious ones. Al-Bustani draws on the history of translation in the Arab world, with specific reference to the approaches used by earlier medieval translators and the much cited classification of translators proposed by al-Safadi.
