Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

silence/quiet, the soundless/ → unheard^9 inside-out/reverse of sound. As rhyme

pairs emerged, they suggested a best-fit rhyme scheme: thus Line 1 and 2’s night-

sight (Figure 47) plus Line 3 and 4’s bird-unheard suggested an AABB CCDD

scheme for the quatrains. This, however, constrained further searches: thus

finding the mute-root rhyme for Lines 7–8, the last piece in the two-quatrain

jigsaw, was particularly time-consuming because I could search only within

those two Lines.

Each Rhyme micro-sequence proper involved an increasingly time-consum-

ing sequence of searches until a viable rhyme-pair was found:

a. free association →

b. rhyming-dictionary search →

c. thesaurus search for synonyms →

d. using thesaurus synonyms as input for free-association and rhyming-diction-

ary searches.

If necessary, source-target semantic distance was tested with Image micro-se-

quences. Initially these allowed only creative adjustments, but if searches (a)→(d)

failed to generate usable rhyme words, I typically repeated the sequence, but with

Image tests allowing creative transformations. The harder it became to find a

rhyme pair, the more radical the creative transformations I became prepared to

accept – as with Line 11’s Where/Whither am I falling → arc, beat by beat from my

heart-clock/-watch, which I finally accepted, after 16m Rhyme searching plus 4m

Image-testing, as a match for Line 9’s dark.

Other factors often complicated this basic pattern. For example (see Figure 47

for the written version), a quick free-association search in the first quatrain gener-

ated night as a potential Line-1 rhyme-fellow for Line 2’s literal sight:

TU191 how do I know there’s a-the wood there when it

itself is darkness, when it is darkness alone? #

TU192 So much # they’re full of it, and the empty sockets

TU193 of nigh- of sight.

TU194 sight and night

Image testing, however, cast doubt on this creative transformation (“it is push-

ing... pushing it a bit”: TU198–199), because I felt that changing Line 1’s dark-

ness into the more specific night would remove some of the poem’s sense of mys-

tery. Unfortunately, my liking for the literal empty sockets of sight as an ending to

Line 2 restricted its rhyme fellows to words that rhymed with sight. This sparked

off a painstaking rhyming-dictionary search for alternatives to night, giving light

and quite:

9. An arrow denotes a revision away from the literal version.

Rhyme Dr1/#3