differences in english & persian pronominal systems as a challenge in literary translation; rendering the third person singular pronoun in the translations of hafiz’s lyrics

the translation of persian poems necessitates the fluency of the translator in source and target languages as well as great knowledge about the delicacies of poetry and the intellectual, social and cultural background of the poet. one of the problems in the process of translation is the incompatibility of the syntactic structures and morphological and grammatical features of the two languages. the source of many of the attractive ambiguities in hafez is the different and contradictory interpretations concerning the addressee in his poems. persian lacks grammatical gender and the third person pronoun in persian /?u/, which refers to the beloved of hafez, defies translation since in english, the translator has to use either masculine or feminine pronouns, each of which provoking a different interpretation. the present study surveys samples of the translation of hafez’s lyrics by three translators, thus analyzing and classifying different methods in the translation of this pronoun.