Chapter 7. Conclusion
conventions”, which determine how “certain translation problems below the text
rank” should be tackled (1991, cited in Hermans 1999: 79).
The constitutive convention adhered to by this book’s translators appears to
prioritize reliable representation, or communicative loyalty to source poet and
target reader. They consistently strive to recreate, as far as possible, their reading
of the source poem in a target version that effectively functions as a receptor-lan-
guage poem. Chapter 3 shows how reviewers share this view of poetry transla-
tion’s purpose.
With regulative conventions, the studies reveal a difference between ‘relation’
or ‘textual-linguistic’ norms (Chesterman 1997: 69; Toury 2000: 203), which gov-
ern source-target textual relationships, and what might be called ‘task-processing’
norms. Looking first at relation norms, some scholars claim that these have much
less influence on poetry translating than on other translation genres – as in Osers’
statement that “I can see no evidence that [relation] norms are consistently or even
extensively reflected in [poetry] translation practice” (1998: 61). Osers cites the
examples of source-poem rhyme and rhythm, where – as the differences between
Derek’s and my approach confirm – there is indeed no consensus whether these
should be reproduced when translating into English. At first sight, this contrasts
sharply with the views and practices of this book’s translators, who seem to follow
the relation norm that their translations should, where possible, recreate the source
poem’s semantics and style (though not necessarily its intrinsic form). The review-
ers in Chapter 3 also see recreating semantics and style as crucial, though they
stress literary norms more than the translators: in particular, highlighting the im-
portance of receptor-language quality.
The key to this conflict is the translators’ proviso “where possible”. They see the
duty to recreate semantics and style as a default position, but not (unlike the re-
viewers) as an absolute one: when the duty becomes impossible to fulfil, they have
to relax their normative guidelines. Tellingly, rhyme and rhythm, which Osers
cites as evidence for the lack of relation norms in poetry translation, were found in
this book to be two of the factors most likely to make the default recreate-every-
thing norm unfulfillable. Nevertheless, such ‘recreation-impossible’ points occur
so often in poetry translating that its relation norms are arguably less rigid and
comprehensive than in other genres (legal or medical translation, for instance).
As for task-processing norms, the concept of cognitive habitus was formulated
in Chapter 5 to account for how this book’s translators showed remarkable consist-
ency in their working processes. Some consistencies arise largely or wholly be-
cause translators face similar cognitive challenges when translating poetry. Other
consistencies are not so cognitively grounded, and therefore may be seen as deriv-
ing more from social discourses of appropriate behaviour – in other words, from
task-processing norms. The latter might well be linked to relation norms: thus