Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
Thus my interpreting the Dizdar poem as strongly sound-based led me to add my
own rhyme (slain-pain) to the verse just mentioned, though the source was
unrhymed. And more subjectivity may enter because of different constraints and
opportunities between the two languages. With pas pseći, for example, BCS offers
an assonance which is lost with the direct English equivalent dog canine – whereas
English offers the cursed cur assonance.
Sometimes the translator’s subjectivity may be so strongly present that rewrit-
er or readers feel there is no relevant similarity between source and target: then the
latter may be called an ‘adaptation’ rather than a translation (Mahon 2006;
cf. Paterson’s “versions”: 2006). The Dizdar extract, I would claim, is a translation,
not an adaptation. Later chapters explore the basis for my claim: what similarities
translators try to retain so that their rewriting remains a translation.2.5 The translator as subject
This section explores the centre of Figure 4, outlining the main psychological
processes which poetry translators might use while translating a source-language
poem – cognition and emotion, and the secondary processes of creativity and
metacognition. Like other aspects of the framework, for clarity’s sake I discuss
these processes separately. In practice, they work closely together, and may even be
indistinguishable: Boase-Beier, for example, points out that “most cognitive ap-
proaches [to literary communication] would take the separation of mental and
emotional to be impossible in principle” (personal communication).2.5.1 Cognition
Cognition comprises the translator’s thought-based operations. After J. R.
Anderson (1995), these use ‘working memory’ (our brain’s ability to think, pay
attention and coordinate different mental and physical processes) to process infor-
mation coming in through eyes and ears, to retrieve knowledge from ‘long-term
memory’ (anything remembered for more than a few seconds), to formulate mes-
sages and actions, and to get the body to speak and do them. Below I outline how
these operations might apply to three key aspects of poetry translating: the transla-
tor’s reading, the translator’s rewriting, and the target reader’s ‘re-reading’.
Reading first involves receiving visual signals from text, assembling them into
words, and holding short multi-word units – like source Line 7’s Crknut će taj pas
pseći – in working memory. ‘Signals’ from a unit (e.g. the word pas, or the p-s al-
literation) then prompt the brain to call up relevant ‘schemata’ – knowledge struc-
tures stored in long-term memory – to interpret it (Stockwell 2002: 75ff ). Relevant