Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
Mid grey shading marks relevant second-order networks, categorized into
three types. ‘Interest networks’ are groups affected by, or with a stake in, the text
complex – the essay collection’s readers, say. ‘Fields’ (after Bourdieu, in Inghilleri
2005: 135) are broader networks involving team members, such as Bosnian →
English literary translators. And ‘systems’ are textual networks, such as the various
books which E and I collaborated on (cited earlier, for example, are not only the
bilingual Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper but also Mahmutćehajić 1998/2000).
Light grey shading marks the third-order networks which condition first- and
second-order subjects, their relations and their actions. These are seen as people-
based ‘imagined communities’ (B. Anderson 1999), such as ‘readers of English’,
and textual ‘polysystems’ (Even-Zohar 2000; cf. Hermans 1999), such as ‘English-
language political writing’.
The following sections look in detail at different areas of the model and their
interactions with other areas.2.4 Poems and translations
A poetry translator’s central role consists of reading and translating poems. I start
by revisiting Chapter 1’s question: why are certain texts seen as poems?2.4.1 Poetry as a genre
Most people would claim to ‘know a poem when they see it’. This implies there is
social agreement about what the genre of poetry involves. Knowledge structures
about poetry, therefore, are acquired and maintained via action and discourse
(reading and writing poems or reviews, say) between subjects within interest
networks (poetry writers and readers, say) and imagined communities (late-20th-
century UK society, say). This also implies that action and discourse between sub-
jects may adapt knowledge structures. Hence, like translation norms, what users
see as typifying poetry as a genre may well vary across time and place – between
Tang Dynasty China and modern France, say. Certain classes of feature, however,
are central to working definitions of any genre: intrinsic form, function, and ex-
trinsic framing.
Intrinsic form denotes a text’s features and structures of language-use. Popular
definitions of a genre are often based on intrinsic-form features seen as typical of
that genre. With Yù jiē yuàn, for example, marked language and linguistic pattern-
ing were mentioned as distinguishing poetry from most prose.
Intrinsic form, of course, simply offers writers a set of options. What each
writer or translator actually does with them, and with other linguistic options