Poetry Translating as Expert Action
5.2 Methods: The Toen wij think-alouds
5.2.1 Setting, source poem and data-gathering
All the Toen wij think-alouds were gathered before, during and after a five-day ex-
pert workshop on translating the collection Totaal witte kamer (2002), by the emi-
nent Dutch poet Gerrit Kouwenaar, into English. Participants, including myself as
a translator-convenor, were asked to prepare translations beforehand and revise
them during the workshop. This gave an authentic context for this chapter’s study.
At home well before the workshop, as a first-stage pilot study, I translated sev-
eral Kouwenaar poems in first draft whilst making think-aloud recordings. These
showed Toen wij (Figure 23) to be the most suitable poem for the full study. In
Totaal witte kamer, Kouwenaar addresses issues of widowerhood, bereavement
and old age. Central, however, as throughout his long oeuvre, is a concern with
memory as an out-of-time space, and with language as a shaper of experience and
memory: Toen wij is typical here. The text worlds of Kouwenaar’s poems are also
shaped by the possibilities of language itself. Thus Stanza I of Toen wij contains
three lexical items with different conventional meanings, but whose surface forms
share the concept of ‘heartbeat’: the idioms onze handen over ons hart streken
(literally ‘stroked our hands over our heart’, figuratively ‘were lenient’) and het
klopte (literally ‘it beat’, figuratively ‘it was correct’), plus the word eensklaps (‘sud-
denly’), whose etymology (‘of one beat’) reveals that it was once also an idiom. This
surface semantic link ‘reactivates’ all three idioms so that they operate on both a
literal and a figurative level, giving an image of great power and tenderness: two
old people lying beside each other, passing their hands over each other’s heart and
feeling it beat, but also forgiving each other and feeling right together. The out-of-
time transcendence this generates lasts till Line 9’s viel toen de tijd in: ‘then time
fell in’ – not only the time around them, but the time in which the poet remembers
this scene. Language’s role as a shaper of the text world is strengthened by an in-
cantatory use of assonance (e.g. Line 3’s weer waar waren, woorden) and a gentle
“poetic pulse” rather than formal rhyme and fixed rhythm.
Pre-analysis of the Krik think-alouds – which, as mentioned, were gathered
earlier – showed differences of emphasis and translating approach between Draft
sessions 1, 2 and 3, but little difference between Drafts 3 and 4 (Jones 2006b: 70).
Again at home before the workshop, therefore, I continued the pilot study by re-
cording think-alouds of myself doing a second and third draft of Toen wij, with a
week’s drawer time between each draft. This confirmed the poem’s suitability and
the viability of data-gathering procedures, which I then replicated in the four-
translator main study.