Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

(e.g. regional vs. standard language), I call ‘style’: a text’s “perceived distinctive

manner of expression” (Boase-Beier 2006: 4, citing Wales), or the presence of its

author’s or translator’s individual ‘voice’ (Munday 2006: 22).

Below I list the key intrinsic-form and stylistic features of the Dizdar poem

identified in my reading (see also: De Beaugrande 1978; Holmes 1988; Jones 1989;

Osers 1996; Zhu 1992; Preminger et al. 1993; D. Davis 1996; Matterson and Jones

2000; Hron 1997; Malroux 1997; Scott 1997; Serrano and Serrano 1998;

Salines 2000). Unless otherwise stated, English quotes show my final version.

• Rhythm (metre). The poem follows no regular metre. A key marker of Dizdar’s
  poetic style, however, is that his free-verse lines grow gradually shorter within
  each ‘verse paragraph’, as in Lines 1–4:
  Pa tajno ćeš kao vješt uhoda sa zapada And secret and sly like a Western spy
  Moje žilište sažeći You’ll burn my home
  Do samog dna Till all
  I pada Fall


• Other sound features. Late 20th-century BCS and English free verse both often
  use assonance: alliteration (e.g. žilište-sažeći, secret-sly above) and vowel rhyme
  (e.g. sa-zapada, sly-like). Irregular line-internal and line-end rhymes
  (e.g. zapada-pada, all-fall), however, are a marked feature of Dizdar’s style.


• Conventional approach and theme: the lyric, for example, or love poetry. Both
  Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper and the cited poem Poruka/Message, may be cat-
  egorized as ‘epic’, for they deal with events of a certain “grandeur and impor-
  tance” within a narrative structure (Preminger et al. 1993: 246).


• Parallelism, where one text segment echoes another in syntactic and/or se-
  mantic terms, as in Lines 20–21:

(Ti ništa ne znaš o gradu u kome ja živim (You know nothing of the town I live in

Ti nemaš pojma o kući u koji ja jedem You cannot imagine the house I eat in

• Deviation from norms of syntax, collocation (words which usually occur to-
  gether), etc., as in Line 10:

A ja ću začudo još na zemlji prisutan

sniti

But by a miracle I will still dream be on

earth

The source line (interlinearly, ‘and/but I will miraculously still on earth

present be dreaming’) deviates from normal syntax and usage: more normal

would be a ja ću začudo još biti prisutan na zemlji (‘and/but I will miracu-

lously still be present on earth’). Besides the slightly unusual word order,