Poetry Translating as Expert Action
1.3 Five studies and a conclusion
The book puts this purpose into action by presenting five research studies, over
five chapters, which develop a model of poetry translators’ action; the model is
summarized in the last chapter. The studies involve different translators, including
myself, but are all directly or indirectly interlinked. Thus Chapters 2 and 3 exam-
ine how English translations of poetry from Bosnia and Herzegovina (henceforth
‘Bosnia’ for short) engage with the country’s difficult transition from component
republika^2 of socialist Yugoslavia to independent European state, whereas
Chapters 5 and 6 present two parallel think-aloud studies. Moreover, the same
translators figure in different chapters: myself in Chapters 2, 5 and 6, and Bruce
and Carl in Chapters 4 and 5.
The studies gradually move from wide-angle to detailed view. The first, in
Chapter 2, draws up a provisional framework for analysing poetry translating. It
uses a case study of a Bosnian poem, which I translated into English during the
1992–1995 Bosnian war, to model the poetry translator as a cognitive and emo-
tional subject involved in networks of discourse, relation and action with other
subjects.
Then, in Chapter 3, a large-scale publications survey explores the interper-
sonal and social context of poetry translation. Again using data from 1990s and
2000s Bosnia, it analyses how poetry translators act in networks of texts and peo-
ple within and across translation projects. It also looks at the socio-political impli-
cations of this action, at how the world-wide web is affecting the publishing and
reading of poetry translations, and at how reader-reviewers perceive translators
and translation projects.
The next study, in Chapter 4, presents data from interviews with five poetry
translators from various languages into English. Translators report mainly about
how they translate and manage their role in translation projects, but also about
their motivations for translating, and their interactions with other actors.
The last two studies use think-aloud data to focus even more closely on what
translators do while translating. In Chapter 5, five translators (including myself )
translate the same unrhymed Dutch poem into English. This establishes transla-
tors’ working patterns and priorities, and also looks at how they tackle specific
problems of double meaning. And Chapter 6, in which I translate a Bosnian hex-
ameter sonnet, asks the most detailed question of all: how far might these patterns
and priorities change when fixed rhyme and rhythm enter the picture?
Finally, in Chapter 7, Chapter 2’s initial model of poetry translating action is
updated and fleshed out with input from the other four studies.- Plural is republike.