Chapter 6. Translating rhyme and rhythm
searches involving dictionary/ thesaurus work and intuitive brainstorming, and
conscious debates as to whether potential rhyme words were appropriate.
Like my fellow translators from Chapters 4 and 5, my overall approach with
Toen wij and Krik involved trying to give target readers a reliable representation of
the source poet’s overall message. Moreover, like many of my fellow translators, I
see this as combining semantic faithfulness with recreating not only the source
poet’s individual style, but also the source poem’s intrinsic form.
This consistency of approach is reflected in a consistency in the metacognitive
task-management procedures I use from poem to poem. Combining a concern
with recreating lexical semantics, underlying image, intrinsic features (be these re-
activated idioms and polysemous lexis, or rhyme and rhythm) and individual style
takes roughly the same time per common lexical item. The task is managed accord-
ing to the same hierarchy, with each unit of action (drafts, runs-through, macro-
sequences, and micro-sequences) taking a similar amount of time and producing a
similar sequence of written versions. The only translation-management difference
derives from the fact that rhyme links words which may be several clauses or Lines
apart: hence macro-sequences establishing rhyme work in larger segments
(two lines or even whole stanzas) than those establishing other poetic features.
As for strategies and approaches that a translator does not share with others,
these too remain stable across poem-types. Thus my ‘mid-loaded’ time manage-
ment style, where Draft 2 is set aside for lengthy tackling of intrinsic-form problems
and Draft 3 is used for final polishing, applied to both poems. The same is true for
my ‘moderately-creative’ approach to tackling conflicts between intrinsic form and
literal meaning, plus my unwillingness to use surface-semantics-only solutions.6.4.1.2 Putting approach into action: Semantics and Jakobson’s poetic
The triple goal mentioned above – of combining loyalty to semantics, to style, and
to intrinsic form – can be hard to achieve with certain intrinsic-form features.
Chapters 5 and 6 have shown this to be the case with reactivated idioms and, to a
lesser extent, polysemous lexis, plus rhyme and fixed rhythm. These exploit Jakob-
son’s ‘poetic’ function of language (1960/1988), in which linguistic form has “au-
tonomous signification” – so that with rhyme, for instance, “phonemic similarity
is sensed as semantic relationship” (1959/2000: 118). By definition, linguistic form
changes from one language to another. Hence, with source features which exploit
Jakobson’s poetic, translators need to search particularly hard to find a target-lan-
guage counterpart which has a similar autonomous signification. This is why reac-
tivated idioms plus Rhyme and Rhythm work dominated my translating time with
Toen wij and Krik. Finding a poetically viable target counterpart for a reactivated
idiom seems to present a bigger individual challenge than finding a rhyme pair or
recreating a Line’s rhythm. A reactivated idiom in one Line, however, does not