Poetry Translating as Expert Action
poems – in translator’s introductions, but also in articles and books (see, for in-
stance, Cowley 1656/2006; Cowper 1791/2006; Dacier 1699/2006; Newman
1856/2006; or more recently, Felstiner 1980; Bly 1983; Weissbort 1989b; Allén
1999; Folkart 2007). Though these typically describe specific target-text solu-
tions for specific source-text problems, they can also reveal that translator’s
working principles and preferred strategies. And by comparing several reports,
one can highlight the working norms of translators in a certain place and time.
One example is the commonly-expressed double goal among recent English-
language translators that a translation should reflect the meaning of the source
poem, but should also work like “an original text” in the receptor language
(Oppenheimer 1996).
A few such studies, however, are particularly useful because they describe
processes directly – Moffet’s articles on translating rhyme (1989, 1999), for exam-
ple, or Folkart’s passionate advocacy of rewriting poems as organic wholes (2007).
Most report of these report on just the author’s processes. But some compare sev-
eral translators, thus supplying more generalizable findings: examples are the mul-
ti-translator interviews by Honig (1985) and Flynn (2004).
Most process-based studies of poetry translating rely on translators’ memories
of how they translated a text. As these may not always reflect accurately what
translators actually do, we also need to examine how poetry translators work in
real time. A key data source here is the ‘think-aloud protocol’ (‘TAP’): the tran-
script of an audio-recorded running commentary in which a translator describes
what she or he is doing and thinking while translating. There are very few TAP
studies into poetry translation: I only know of my own exploratory 2006b study,
plus MA dissertations by Lam (1991) and Liao (2002). However, the rich body of
TAP-based research into non-literary translation (see e.g. Jääskeläinen 2002; Tirk-
konen-Condit 2002b) is a valuable resource for examining how poetry translating
processes compare with translating in other genres.
Finally, a few studies (Flynn 2004, for example) look at processes beyond
translating itself, such as text selection and getting published. Here too, as with
think-aloud studies, further research could yield valuable insights into aspects of
poetry translators’ action that are still relatively unexplored.
Turning now to poetry translation as product, there are many published cri-
tiques of translated poetry, typically based on contrastive analyses of source and
target text in terms of linguistic and stylistic features. Their main focus is often on
the writers and texts in question, and therefore implications for poetry translat-
ing in general tend to be brief or implicit. A good number of researchers, how-
ever – often also poetry translators themselves – use contrastive techniques to
explore such implications directly. These provide crucial input to this book.
Holmes’s Translated! (1988) is particularly valuable. Though Barnstone focuses