Chapter 1. Introduction
within and outside the team. ‘Player’, of course, has other meanings besides ‘game
participant’. The theatrical meaning shows how poetry translators act out someone
else’s words on a new language’s stage: hence the book also looks at what this might
mean for the poetry translator’s identity, and his or her relationship to the source
poet. ‘Players’, too, can simply be people who play, which captures the playfulness
of what poetry translators do with poetic language, and the sheer pleasure that
often drives them. This in turn signals two other sub-themes in this book: the na-
ture of translators’ creativity, and what motivates them to translate.
The book focuses exclusively on ‘published’ poetry translators: those who par-
ticipate with other actors in projects that communicate with real audiences. The
communication may be live (poetry festival readings, for example) or recorded,
print- or web-based, in academic or popular editions, or as add-ons to non-poetry
projects; and audiences may be readers or listeners, though from now on I use
‘readers’ as shorthand for both. Conversely, I do not explore the action of trainee
translators, or of translators who self-publish on internet blogs, etc., though
boundaries are inevitably fuzzy here.
Two other sub-questions addressed in this book concern the status of these
published poetry translators. Firstly, the book title proposes that their action
should be seen as Expert. Expert action, according to Sirén and Hakkarainen, ap-
plies specialized “high-level knowledge and skills” to a specific domain (2002: 80).
However, rather than simply assuming that published poetry translators are ex-
perts, I ask how far their knowledge and skills are high-level and domain-specific,
and therefore expert. Secondly, poetry translators often work part-time and for
little pay. Hence whether they should call themselves ‘professional’, however ex-
pert their action, is open to debate – a debate which I address.
This book’s central principle is that action is both personal and interpersonal.
Hence the ‘norms’ governing poetry translators’ action and output, including what
makes an acceptable translation, are conventions negotiated among social actors- like translators themselves, publishers and critics (Chesterman 1997: 51–85;
Hermans 1999). This means that different literary communities might have differ-
ent norms, actions and outputs. The literary community supplying this book’s pri-
mary data (via case studies, surveys, interviews and recordings) consists of poetry
translators into English, mainly from European languages, around the turn of the
21st century, plus their poets, editors, publishers and readers. Therefore, strictly
speaking, the book maps the action of translators within this community, which
has several implications.
Firstly, the book also draws on published writings by poetry-translation
scholars and poetry translators. Nevertheless, though these belong to a long,
world-wide tradition (see, for instance, the historical anthologies of translation
scholarship by Schulte and Biguenet 1992, Weissbort and Eysteinsson 2006, and