Chapter 1. Introduction
- because we enjoy it, because it moves or mentally enriches us. And with trans-
lated poetry, hearing voices from beyond the boundary fence of our own language
can give added value. This may be the excitement of meeting a major poetic voice
or exploring a rich and maybe new literary culture. Or it may be the sense of enter-
ing a world cultural mainstream. Thus Alan, the English poet and translator inter-
viewed in Chapter 4, describes how as a reader he “benefited fantastically from
that 1970s, 80s Penguin Modern Poets [series]: poems from Spanish, from Serbo-
Croatian, from Russian, from Portuguese and so on”.
This means that poetry carries high cultural prestige – high “symbolic capital”,
in Bourdieu’s sociology (Gouanvic 2005: 161–162). Thus translating poetry is
more prestigious than translating technical handbooks or even crime novels, say.
This is not only perceived by audiences in the receptor culture. People from the
source culture may also see translation as confirming or even enhancing the sym-
bolic capital of ‘their’ poet, and poetry translators may benefit from this “invested”
capital (Keeley 2000: 104; Gouanvic 2005: 161–162; Casanova 2002/2010).
Hence poetry translation also matters inter-culturally. Translating can bring a
source poet and poems into the international mainstream, thus validating them in
‘universal’ terms (Lefevere 1975: 106–107; Casanova 2002/2010) – especially when
the poems move from a ‘non-globalized’ language used in a limited area into a
‘globalized’ language used across the globe (from Thai into Spanish, say). This can
also help the source-language community to assert itself internationally. Tymoczko,
for example, has described how translators of Irish-language epic poetry into Eng-
lish played a crucial role in promoting Irish cultural identity during the late 19th
century (1999).
Conversely, poetry translation can benefit the receptor culture. As Chinese
scholar Mao Dun put it, “the translation of foreign poetry can be a means of revi-
talizing our own poetry” (Mao 1922/2004). Similarly, UK poet and translator Dick
Davis claims that verse translation, “this apparently secondary and cautious activ-
ity [...] has initiated virtually every major rhetorical innovation in English poetry”
(2002: 82–83). In 1960s and 1970s UK, for example, poet Ted Hughes and several
of his contemporaries admired Central and Eastern European poets such as the
Serb Vasko Popa and the Hungarian János Pilinszky. Translations of these poets’
works were seen as bringing a crucial directness and powerful use of metaphor
into English poetry, and their influences have been detected in Hughes’ poetry
(Doce 1997: 48; Jarniewicz 2002). Indeed, poets’ enthusiasm for poetry written in
another language may inspire them not just to read it in translation, but to trans-
late it – as, for example, with US poet Robert Bly’s translations of works by Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda (Bly 1983: 83–97).
Cross-cultural transmission need not always be purposeful – it may simply
happen as a side-effect of poetry translation. But happen it does. According to