chapter 6
Translating rhyme and rhythm
6.1 Introduction: Comparing two poems’ processes
This chapter presents a case study of myself translating a BCS poem, Krik (‘Cry’),
into English. Its data gathering and analysis methods parallel those used for
Chapter 5, where I am one of the subjects. Hence this chapter continues Chapter 4
and 5’s cognitive storyline, by examining how far my processes and strategies
might be modified by changes in:
- Intrinsic form: from free verse with reactivated idioms (Toen wij) to a sonnet
with a strict rhyme and rhythm pattern (Krik). - Language pair: from lexically cognate languages with similar, largely word-
order-based grammars (Dutch → English), to lexically non-cognate languages
with dissimilar grammars (largely morpheme-based BCS → largely word-or-
der-based English). - Setting: from an expert workshop in the Netherlands to a published project
initiated in Bosnia.
Chapter 6 also continues the BCS-based interpersonal and socio-political storyline
from Chapters 2 and 3: Krik was part of a project commissioned by Chapters 2’s E,
and it appears in Chapter 3’s publications survey. This means this chapter can also
explore how far my working strategies and techniques might reflect the project’s
interpersonal and socio-political setting.
As argued below, many of this chapter’s findings may be cautiously general-
ized to more translators than myself. Hence they form a useful final input to this
book’s developing model of poetry translators’ action.
6.2 Methods: Krik and the Kulenović project
6.2.1 Setting, source poem and data-gathering
After the bilingual Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper (Dizdar 1973/1999), whose editor
was essayist E, E asked me to supply the English translations for a similar edition
of Skender Kulenović’s forty-poem Soneti (‘Sonnets’, 1968–1974, collected in
Kulenović 1988): see Figure 42. Soneti/Sonnets was published as a hardback issue