Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

between the other two patterns, ‘front-loading’ vs. more ‘even-loading’, could not

be proved statistically. Moreover, recording just three drafts ensured comparability

across translators, but meant that actual drafting behaviour was under-reported.

All translators reported doing incidental revision between drafts; Hugo, as men-

tioned, did a full extra draft; I had a session with a Dutch-native informant be-

tween Drafts 2 and 3^10 ; and Geoff added that, besides the “four or five intensive

drafts” mentioned earlier, he would normally “look at [a poem] many more times,

maybe just reading through and maybe just changing a word, or putting in an al-

ternative to think about” if he were translating for publication. Hence, especially

with data from just five translators, any conclusions about inter-translator differ-

ences must remain tentative.

5.3.3 Runs-through

Translators averaged 4.0 runs-through per draft. There was no significant tenden-

cy for some drafting sessions, or some translators, to produce shorter runs-through

than others^11. Individual runs-through, however, varied widely in length with

each translator: see Figure 35. Translating and revising, therefore, did not involve

a series of steady passes through the poem, but were managed by a combination of

quick, whole-text overviews and slow, intensive, detailed work-throughs. This is

shown by following one translator, Irene, through her three drafts.

In Draft 1, Irene’s pre-reading phase involved three runs-through. In RT1

(14tu/1m: see Figure 35) she quickly read out the poem “to get an idea of the

rhythm”. In RT2 (72tu/6m), she established the poem’s text world, using three

knowledge-sources:

• Linguistic knowledge, as with the Line 1 idiom:
  TU32 over het hart streken:
  TU33 doe je vaak met een kind, je [you often do with a child, you] you turn a blind eye,
  so to speak, in English,
  TU34 you give in.


• Intertextual knowledge of the poet’s oeuvre:
  TU44 oud vlees: this is a typical Kouwenaar sort of turn of phrase.
  TU45 Talking about not your old bodies, but your old flesh.


• Real-world knowledge about the poem’s inspiration, from the session with the
  source poet as informant.

10. This was recorded but – for consistency’s sake – not used in this study.


11. One-way ANOVA: F 1.49, p 0.24 (drafts); F 0.93, p 0.45 (translators).