Chapter 5. Five translators translate
Constraints, therefore, trigger not creativity itself, but the relevance judgements
which have the potential to make translators consider creative solutions.
In any case, Dryden’s non-creative metaphrase (see 3.5.3) – close semantic
correspondence between source and target segments – remained the ‘unmarked’,
default technique. Only some of the translators shifted creatively outside the orig-
inal semantic fields (e.g. Geoff ’s shift from the small cold [of autumn] to [autumn]
hinted at winter: Figure 24), and then only occasionally. Moreover, appropriacy
with such shifts always involved keeping to the translator’s interpretation of image
and text-world meaning – Dryden’s “sense”. Thus, of Dryden’s two creative options,
only paraphrase was considered: as in Chapters 2 and 4, no translators were pre-
pared to imitate.
If semantic novelty is defined as a shift outside the source semantic field, there-
fore, this study’s evidence suggests – surprisingly, perhaps – that creativity is pe-
ripheral in poetry translation. But if it is defined less rigorously, as any reshaping
away from lexical equivalence, then many – perhaps most – of these translators’
solutions are creative. This applies, for instance, to Fleur’s rhythm- and assonance-
based revision of Line 6 (literally ‘like smoke happiness hung around us, outside’)
into like smoke bliss surrounded us, outside, where bliss is semantically more in-
tense than happiness, and surrounded is semantically less concrete than hung
around. It may still be useful to distinguish between shifts within the same seman-
tic field, like these, and shifts into a different field – the less novel ‘creative adjust-
ments’ and the more novel ‘creative transformations’ respectively. Nevertheless, a
problem-solving model of creativity implies that what matters is not how novel a
solution is, but how effectively it solves the translation problem.
Process-wise, even the translators who considered novel solutions (like their
Chapter-4 counterparts) only did so if non-novel solutions seemed unsuitable.
Then they moved only gradually and reluctantly away from surface semantics – in
one case, later returning to surface semantics. Semantic creativity, therefore, can
best be seen as a sub-set of options within a wider strategy of managing translation
loss. When elements of a source segment’s meaning potential – be they semantic,
intrinsic-poetic or stylistic, microstructural or macrostructural – risk becoming
lost, translators negotiate between keeping, abandoning and creatively changing
the various elements, until they find a solution that best fits their personal appro-
priacy criteria for that segment.
Descriptions of creative processes often stress the need to get round “fixa-
tions”: conventional and therefore cognitively dominant solutions which block ac-
cess to creative solutions (Kussmaul, in Heiden 2005: 452). This could partially
explain the many drafts, runs-through and versions in this study: abandoning a
problem for a time allows the fixation to recede into the cognitive background,
giving space for creative solutions to emerge when the problem is returned to. A