Chapter 7. Conclusion
become hard to distinguish from second-order interest networks. Conversely, the
larger the community, the harder it becomes to define: the boundaries of ‘English-
language poetry’, for instance, and its relationships with ‘UK poetry’ on the one
hand and ‘English literature’ on the other are extremely fuzzy. Moreover, a poetry
translation project may often be produced within a sub-culture but try to place the
text within the broader matrix culture. Agee’s Scar on the Stone (1998b), for exam-
ple, was produced within a similar sub-culture as Spirit of Bosnia, but appears
aimed at English-language poetry readers in general.7.5.4 Ideology
This book’s studies have shown that ideological analyses of poetry translation need
to distinguish between the translator’s textual decisions and the project team’s stra-
tegic decisions, as described below.
Looking first at textual decisions, these are inevitably informed by aesthetic
and intercultural ideologies: the translator’s view of what makes a good poem or
translation, plus how it should be communicated to a target reader. The effects of
socio-political ideologies on textual decisions, by contrast, were conspicuous by
their absence. Of course, the only unequivocal evidence for such effects can come
from points at which the translator does not follow the norm of close semantic cor-
respondence between source and target poem: otherwise, no matter how ideologi-
cally charged the target poem, the translator may simply be following the prevail-
ing relation norm. Nevertheless, there were plenty of recreation-impossible points
in the Stone Sleeper extract, Toen wij and Krik which forced translators away from
close semantic correspondence, and very few decisions with socio-political impli-
cations were identified across the seven target versions. This implies that textual
decisions only rarely betray the translator’s own socio-political stance; though this
might arguably most often happen in formally challenging poems with a clear so-
cio-political content like the Stone Sleeper extract, evidence even here was far from
clear-cut. This is partially confirmed by Johnson’s survey of English translators
working on Pablo Neruda’s highly political free-verse epic Canto General, where
only one translator revealed a personal ideology in his textual choices: a tendency
to add Christian nuances where there were none in the source poems (2010).
The selection, presentation and distribution decisions of the teams analysed in
this book show a rather different picture, however. Their deliberate or unconscious
attempts to promote the source culture, or a sub-culture or interest group within
it, often revealed an intercultural ideology. Typical was the belief that differences
in poetic culture enrich target readers’ experiences: that US literature needs an
international dimension, for instance. Team decisions often, however, also reflect-
ed a socio-political ideology: that poetry translation should oppose ethnonationalist