Chapter 6. Translating rhyme and rhythm
Interesting here is how I override my misgiving (“it’s pushing it a bit”) at this crea-
tive transformation. I first freed myself from the suspicion of source-poet disloy-
alty, by arguing that Kulenović would probably have used dream if he had been
writing English. This allowed Image-testing to approve an allusion to Australian
aboriginal dreamtime, which – being receptor-culture-based – made sense in tar-
get-text-world rather than source-text-world terms.
Polishing, however, did not always aim for fluency. Sometimes it aimed for
disfluency, to reflect Kulenović’s hermetic, rough-hewn style:
TU706 The
TU707 English is being slightly too comprehensible,
whereas it’s dense and Ted Hughes-ish in
TU708 the original.6.3.5.6 Semantic shifts and creativity
With Chapter 5’s translators, the Stanza I idiom complex was the main source
both of creative transformations, which shifted surface semantics in order to
preserve intrinsic-form or stylistic effects, and of surface-semantics-only solu-
tions, which preserved surface semantics at the cost of deleting intrinsic-form or
stylistic effects. This idiom complex also dominated my translating time in To e n
wij, whereas Rhyme and Rhythm accounted for almost a third (31.6%) of my
translating time in Krik. This raises a double question: what effect might the dif-
ference in poetic problems between the two poems have on (a) the amount of
creative transformations and surface-semantics-only solutions, and (b) the ratio
between them?
This was explored by analyzing semantic-field shifts in the Draft-3 version of
each poem. These were defined as common lexical items that were ‘Added’ or
‘Moved’ to a new semantic field (creative transformations proper), plus items that
were ‘Deleted’ (after Jones 2007): see Figure 52. With reactivated idioms, changes
could affect literal and/or figurative meaning (plain text and italics respectively in
Figure 52).
Toen wij has a significantly lower density of semantic-field shifts (8, or 15% of
source-poem common lexical items) than Krik (32, or 33%)^10. Moreover, Toen
wij’s shifts are concentrated in its first stanza, whereas Krik’s occur throughout the
poem. Relatively few Deletions occur (two in Toen wij and four in Krik), and most
are of function words (and, were, already, even), with just one Deleted content
word (find: Krik Line 12): hence loss of semantic meaning due to Deletions is neg-
ligible. No surface-semantics-only solutions were found in either poem.- Chi-square 4.2, p 0.04.
Feel/Flow Dr3/#4