Poetry Translating as Expert Action
requires report- or essay-writing skills, plus intertextual skills (checking that quotes
in a Translator’s Introduction, for example, are consistent with the main text).7.2.3 Norms and creativity
7.2.3.1 Norms
The patterns of practice revealed by this book’s translators confirm that poetry-
translating norms are best seen as ‘scripts’: action schemata, or “socioculturally
defined mental protocol[s] for negotiating a situation” (Stockwell 2002: 77). These
are acquired by discourse and shared action between relevant players across a
translator’s career web. As a translator’s web gradually incorporates more projects
and players, these scripts presumably give the translator clearer insights into what
is acceptable versus what is not, into when notions of acceptability become fuzzy,
contested or fail to apply, and into when norms can be breached with impunity or
even praise versus when they are breached at one’s peril.
Relevant players are fellow translators, but also literary editors, publishers,
target readers and reviewers – all of whom evaluate the translator’s output. This
has two consequences. Firstly, poetry-translation norms are influenced by both
general-translation and literary-production norms. For example, the ethic of
source-poet loyalty found throughout this book reflects a translation norm com-
mon to most genres. The fact that Derek finds it acceptable to abandon a source
poem’s rhyme and rhythm when translating, by contrast, almost certainly re-
flects the modern English-language literary norm which favours free verse as a
vehicle for serious poetry (Osers 1998). Secondly, non-translator players have
their own poetry-translation norms. These, however, may lack awareness of how
poetry translators often have to decide or compromise between two conflicting
norms: with archaized source poems, for instance, between the translational
norm favouring stylistic faithfulness and a literary norm disfavouring receptor-
language archaisms.
Nevertheless, it would be simplistic to regard norms as arbitrary or oppressive.
Like all schemata, they reduce the cognitive load involved in processing experi-
ence by imposing patterns. This enables poetry translators to automatize at least
part of their task – deciding how far the target poem should resemble the source,
say. Norms also enable readers to assess a translated poem – allowing them to as-
sume, say, that its semantics, form and style resemble those of the source poem
unless they are told otherwise.
This book’s studies highlight how poetry-translation norms operate at two lev-
els: underlying principle, and applications of this principle. The former corre-
sponds to Nord’s “constitutive conventions”, which “determine what a particular
culture community accepts as a translation”, and the latter to her “regulative