Poetry Translating as Expert Action
structure” in favour of the direct image (Preminger et al. 1993: 377). But by using
free verse (that is, without rhyme and rhythm) it might also be seen as imposing
English-language poetic values on Li Po’s poem – an example of how, by transla-
tion, a globally “dominant” receptor culture can “annex” items produced in a
“dominated” source culture (Casanova 2002/2010). Here, the native-Chinese
translator Xu’s strict rhyme and rhythm may be seen as resisting this process, sig-
nalling Li Po’s place in a millennia-long Chinese poetic tradition.
And within this already complex frame there is great space for variation. Dif-
ferent poetry translation projects set different demands. And poetry translators
have their own life histories, personalities, working styles and principles, and work
in different social and physical environments.1.1.2 Poetry translation as expert action
The poetry translator’s work, therefore, is complex and wide-ranging, and can
have rich real-world effects. It is this book’s purpose to shed more light on this
work, but also to seek out what patterns might underlie its apparent complexity.
The book’s title describes this work as Expert Action. The core meaning of Action
is a process of doing, typically intentional, with the aim of having some influence
or effect (OED 2010). Hence, as signalled in the subtitle, the book analyses poetry
translators’ Processes of reading and rewriting, as guided by their Priorities, or ef-
fects they intend to convey in the translated poem.
Action, however, also alludes to Latour’s Actor Network Theory (1987; cf. Ryder
2010a; 2010b), which analyses how people work together in Networks of other ‘ac-
tors’, and how what they produce have effects in their turn. Hence this book also
explores how poetry translators work in ‘teams’ with other people (like source
poets, text helpers, editors and publishers) to produce ‘translation projects’ that
bring translated poems to audiences. More widely, it explores how poetry transla-
tors enter and form a community of shared actions and values, and how teams and
their translations interact with a social, political, literary and cultural context that
spans the worlds of the source and receptor language.
Alongside ‘actor’, I use two other terms to refer to translators and others in-
volved in the processes of producing poetry translations: ‘agent’ and ‘player’. ‘Agent’
I usually use to denote someone who carries out action. However, ‘agent’ can also
mean someone who acts for another (cf. Milton and Bandia 2009): this signals
how translators may often act to help others, such as source poets or anthology
editors – an issue also explored here. ‘Players’, in Goffman’s social theory, are those
who perform a role in a social ‘game’, an activity defined by certain conventions
(1959/1971, 1970). This highlights another issue explored here: how the transla-
tor’s roles and actions are guided by conventions and expectations from others