Poetry Translating as Expert Action
between three levels of action. At the highest level, a collective ‘activity’ (e.g. the
essay publication project) has an ‘object’ (e.g. to publish the essays in English) with
an underlying ‘motive’ (e.g. to help defend a multi-ethnic Bosnia). At an interme-
diate level, the overall activity and its object are enabled by individual or collective
‘actions’ (e.g. translating the Dizdar quotation), each with its own ‘goal’ (e.g. to add
an English quotation to E’s essay); these local goals, however, may or may not re-
late to the overall activity motive (e.g. my translating strategies seemed driven
more by internalized poetry-translation norms than by political motivations). Fi-
nally, at the most detailed level, these actions are enabled by ‘automatic operations’
(e.g. changing Line 1’s spy from West into Western spy); these are driven by the
conditions or tools used to perform the action (e.g. the grammar and phonology
of English, and my belief that Dizdar’s rhymes should be preserved).
Thus, where Actor Network Theory shows how motives, objects and goals are
generated within a network, Activity Theory analyses how they power a network’s
action. Like Actor Network Theory, Activity Theory also stresses the intertwined-
ness of action and communication: “people construct their institutions and activi-
ties above all by means of material and discursive, object-oriented actions”
(Engeström and Miettinen 1999: 10). It too sees relation as important: analysing
any activity involves analysing dialogue and interaction between the whole system
and individual subjects (ibid.). People, however, are more than the sum of their
social relationships, and conversely, “collective practices are not reducible to sums
of individual action” (ibid.: 11). The essay project’s action, therefore, is more than
a bundle of essay-writing, translating, editing, and publishing actions, but there is
also more to the actors than their role in the project (and even their other interper-
sonal networks). This implies that this book’s research needs to combine various
foci: human subjects and their texts, plus what motivates both, what they do, and
how they interact.
Goffman’s Social Game Theory analyses how teams interact with other teams,
and how different actions may share underlying features. It sees social activity as
involving different prototypical ‘games’, each played by ‘parties’ or ‘teams’ of hu-
man ‘players’ performing various prototypical roles, with each party trying to pro-
mote its own interests (Goffman 1959/1971, 1970: 86–89; Wadensjö 1992/1998;
Jones 2000, 2009). One player role, for example, is the ‘ambassador’, who transmits
messages between different parties, but is also empowered to negotiate for her or
his own party. This models how poetry translators transmit poems whilst repre-
senting a source poet or culture (Jones 2000: 69). If poetry translation is team ac-
tion, however, this implies that these tasks are carried out not by one ‘ambassador’,
but by a multi-person ‘embassy’ (Jones 2009: 305). Thus, in this case study, the
embassy team made up of T1, T2, P, etc. communicates the interests of E’s party
(E and those who share his views and aims) to a party of target readers.