Poetry Translating as Expert Action
micro-sequences that followed them became fewer, showing that problems were
becoming less intractable and the target poem was becoming more acceptable.5.4.1.4 Creativity
So how far might the textual outcomes and strategic processes emerging from this
study be seen as creative? Creativity was defined in Chapter 2 as applying novel but
appropriate solutions to a problem. Looking first at novelty, some translator-crea-
tivity researchers see this as involving changes in semantic microstructure between
source and target text (Fontanet 2005: 438ff; Kussmaul 2005: 389; Jones 2007).
Several examples of this occurred in the transcripts, the most radical being Geoff ’s
re-imaging of stroked-hands-heart + leniency into threw-caution-winds + boldness.
For this study’s translators, appropriacy appears to incorporate Holmes’s dou-
ble aim: that they should convey the most relevant meaning potential of the source
text-segment, poetic feature, etc. in a poetically effective receptor-language form.
With the handen-hart-streken idiom, for example, Fleur and Irene saw its literal
meaning as most relevant. This ruled out novel and hence creative solutions, thus
forcing them to abandon other meaning potentials – both the figurative meaning,
and reactivated idiomaticity as a poetic device. Geoff, by contrast, saw the idiom’s
real-world inspiration as most relevant, thus allowing himself the freedom to ex-
plore semantically very novel, and therefore very creative, solutions. Hugo and I
took an in-between route: feeling that literal meaning, figurative meaning and re-
activated idiomaticity were all equally relevant, we allowed ourselves a moderately
circumscribed field of novelty loosely linked to hands, heart and leniency, resulting
in moderately rather than radically creative solutions. Moreover, trying to meet
three relevance criteria almost certainly explains why Hugo and I spent more time
on this Line than the other translators, who set themselves just one criterion.
This study also supports Holman and Boase-Beier’s claim that constraints are
a source of translation creativity (1999): indeed, creative solutions were only con-
sidered when translators felt that there were constraints on microstructural equiv-
alence. Constraints did not necessarily predict creative solutions, however, or their
degree. When the translators’ action was constrained because there was no obvious
English equivalent for the handen-hart-streken idiom, some chose the non-creative
option of simply reproducing surface semantics, whereas others chose creative
shifts, which ranged from cautious to radical. Moreover, creativity at one point
need not predict creativity at another. Of the three translators who used creative,
idiomaticity-preserving shifts for the handen-hart-streken idiom, only one used a
similar shift for eensklaps. Whereas I converted it into the reactivated English idi-
om in a heartbeat, Geoff and Hugo chose the ‘surface-semantics-only’ solution of
suddenly – perhaps because, unlike handen-hart-streken, eensklaps is no longer
conventionally seen as an idiom, thus making it more resistant to being reactivated.