humor and translation: a case study of black humor in langston hughes's poetry

black humor plays a crucial role in fulfilling langston hughes's anti-racist purposes as an integral notionin his poetry. accordingly, translation(s) of his poetry are to benefit from the same indexes onthe basis of equivalent effect principle. on this account, 33 black-humor-rich poems of hughes, translatedby ahmad shamloo, yaghma golruee and hassan fayyad, were selected to be analyzed contrastivelyin search of black humor indexes in the target text (tt). then they were all analyzed based onthe six-leveled knowledge resources (kr) hierarchy, including language (la), narrative strategy(ns), target (ta), situation (si), logical mechanism (lm) and script opposition (so), proposed byattardo and raskin. the result demonstrated that all the levels remained approximately intact throughthe translation except the la and so which appeared the most vulnerable. that is, mistranslation atthe language level of a linguistic chunk which has a direct implication to specific scripts of black humorleads to the loss of black humor indexes in the tt.