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describe him, I will mention all his defects and bad traits". The
Arabic text of the second wife's statement is pregnant with
alliteration and assonance. The lexical elements of the text are
skillfully well-knitted in a profoundly rhythmic pattern un-
transferable in another langauge. The woman wants to say: "I don't
like to talk about my husband. If I did, I'm afraid I wouldn't stop.
For his defects are innumerable.' 'Defects' is represented in the ST
by two consecutive words,'4u'arahu' and 'bu'arahu' which are assonant,
onomatopoeic, and obsolete. Such archaisms evoke a sense of
loathsomeness which accounts for the women's reluctance to speak about
her husband. Her husband is ill-behaved, arrogant, mean and
uncompromising. Though the translator has kept the meaning of the
original intact, he failed to reflect the beauty of the Arabic
expression.
The third wife (TT) said: "My husband is a tall man: if I describe
him (and he hears of that) he will divorce me, and if I keep quiet, he
will neither divorce me nor treat me as a wife". The translator sought
30 words, plus 5 bracketed ones, to cloak the meaning of an eight-word
statement. This shows how condensed, compact, economized and well-knit
the ST is. The second word 'aliu shannaq' rhymes with the fourth
'utallaq' and the eighth 'utallaq'. The internal rhyme plus the
antithesis between the third word 'antiq' and the seventh 'ask(te
create an exquisite equilibrium between the syntactic and semantic
profiles of the text. Besides, the careful choice of the word
Cusuhannaq' is both denotative and connotative. It does not only mean
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