Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

Chapter 6. Translating rhyme and rhythm 

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5

10

15

20

25

Draft 1 Draft 2 Draft 3

Tape-units per common lexical item

Francis

"toen wij"

Francis

"Krik"

Figure 46. Tape-units per common lexical item, by Draft: Toen wij vs. Krik

This pattern, therefore, almost certainly shows an underlying time-management

preference – rather than being simply due to my not identifying handen-hart-

streken as an idiom until Draft 2 of Toen wij, as suggested earlier. Reasons for this

underlying preference, but also for the inter-poem differences in Drafts 1 and 3,

can be explored by looking qualitatively at each draft.

In Draft 1, with both poems I followed Chapter 5’s five-translator pattern of

first familiarizing myself with the source poem’s content and form (noting “hex-

ameter, 15-syllable, rhyme”: Figure 47) and then producing an alternative-solu-

tions literal version. With Krik, I also did brief free-association searches for rhyme

words (night and sight in Figure 47, for example), but broke off if these were unsuc-

cessful: knowing how time-consuming Rhyme work could be, I preferred to leave

lengthy searches till Draft 2 (for more details on rhyme searches, see p. 298ff ). In

Toen wij’s Draft 1 I did no comparable intrinsic-features work, which probably

explains Krik’s longer Draft-1 time per common lexical item.

In Draft 2, with both poems I hand-wrote differently coloured revisions onto

Draft 1’s literal version, focusing this time on intrinsic poetic effects: double mean-

ings and assonance with Toen wij (Figure 33), and rhyme and rhythm with Krik

(Figure 48). The similar intensity of work per poem (Figure 46) implies that both

combinations of structuring devices present a similar degree of challenge.