Poetry Translating as Expert Action
- are largely similar, with relatively minor variations. This chapter has shown that
this also applies to the same translator working on different poems. Since, as this
translator, my attitudes and working practices are not only similar to those of my
peers but also remain relatively similar across different poem-types, this provides
more evidence for a relatively stable cognitive habitus as an expression of poetry
translating expertise within a social context.
A new poem, therefore, is tackled not as a completely new challenge but as a
variant on previous challenges. This applies at all levels of translator action, from
decisions relating to the translator’s social-ethical role (e.g. setting the limits of
creativity), via translation management strategies (e.g. dividing work across drafts
and versions), to translating strategies and processes proper (e.g. using sound and
meaning considerations to select a target-version word). As argued earlier, appro-
priate actions at all these levels are internalized as cognitive schemata within the
experienced translator’s mind. The cognitive habitus, therefore, contains a mental
toolkit of strategies and procedures. Some tools are general-purpose and can po-
tentially be applied to any new job, such as the ability to test a target item’s seman-
tic fit with the source’s text world; others, however, are more specialist, such as the
ability to use a rhyming dictionary. Hence the cognitive habitus also contains
knowledge of what tools to use where.
As for how the tools are used, I and my four peers select between three
processing modes (as outlined by Mondahl and Jensen 1996: 100–101), de-
pending on the task in hand: ‘skill-based’ (activating procedural knowledge),
‘knowledge-based’ (activating declarative knowledge), and ‘experience-based’
(activating declarative plus procedural knowledge). The strategy of first reading
through the source poem, then writing a literal version, and then revising it re-
peatedly for intrinsic form and style, is an example of skill-based processing: the
automatized, wholistic and unthinking implementation of, in this case, a man-
agement strategy appropriate for ensuring attention to both source-poem mean-
ing and target-poem quality. My debate as to whether dreaming might be a suit-
able counterpart for drijema is an example of knowledge-based processing: the
conscious, analytic processing appropriate, in this case, for debating the potential
risks and gains of choosing a specific word. Crucial to the poetry translator’s ex-
pertise, however, is experience-based processing. Drawing on experience of tack-
ling similar, highly complex problems in the past, this is both “analytic” (ibid.),
since it involves consciously analysing the problem in hand, and “creative”, since
it proposes a flexible range of skill-based and knowledge-based sub-routines, and
then implements them. An example of experience-based processing is the con-
struction of a rhyme scheme for the Krik translation, in which I repeatedly
toggled between evaluating the overall rhyme scheme, individual rhyme-pair