Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

Unlike the others, in Draft 1 I had not realised that Line 1’s onze handen over ons

hart streken was an idiom, and therefore potentially problematic. Only in Draft 2

did I suspect this, confirming it with a dictionary check. This started an exception-

ally long macro-sequence, in which I tried to find an adequate translation for this

idiom and fit it into the whole stanza. At 1h 9m, this macro-sequence dominated

Draft 2’s very long translating time of 1h 42m. Line 1 itself accounted for no less

than 59% of Draft 2’s Line-specific time, compared to an expected percentage of

9% per Line^9. The problematic nature of this Stanza is also reflected in the com-

plexity of my working version (Figure 33), where I followed my usual strategy of

adding revisions in another colour of pen (in this case, darker) to the Draft 1 ver-

sion. For clarity’s sake, I therefore finished my long tussle with the triple idiom by

writing a new, pure-line version of these Lines.

Figure 33. Toen wij: Draft 2 working version (Francis, Lines 1–3)

9. Time identifiable as spent on specific poem Lines.