Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
As for the target reader’s re-reading, poetry translation is almost always ‘overt’
(House 1981; cf. Holmes 1988: 10). That is, target readers almost always know that
they are reading translations – usually because the original poet’s name is cited,
along with information signalling that he or she was writing in another language
(Mak Dizdar, Stone Sleeper, Sarajevo, 1966, for instance, in Figure 3).
This book also assumes that communication between poetry translators and
target readers follows general rules of interpersonal communication. One such
rule is that a writer intends to communicate a certain ‘message’ to readers and,
bearing in mind readers’ likely knowledge schemata, tries to give the right amount
and type of signals for them to grasp this message (Gutt 2000: 31–34; Pilkington
2000: 75; Matterson and Jones 2000: 78–79). In literature, as already mentioned,
these signals may be hard to reduce to one clear interpretation – but, I would ar-
gue, this does not mean that the author’s intent is unreadable from literary texts, as
some theorists have claimed (e.g. Wimsatt & Beardsely, in Matterson and Jones:
ibid.). It does mean, however, that while translators are translating, they need to
guess their target readers’ knowledge schemata – plus other factors such as read-
ers’ cognitive processing ability or their emotional openness to the text (Kwan-
Terry 1992: 213; Gutt 2000: 107; Stockwell 2002: 123).
What translators do with this guesswork depends on various factors. They
may wish, for instance, to keep a source-poem signal even though few target read-
ers have the knowledge to interpret its meaning. Thus I used words like cur to re-
flect a slightly archaized voice in the source poem (the archaic žilište for ‘home’,
say), although the medieval text-world they signalled seemed irrelevant to the ex-
tract’s function in E’s book. Or translators might feel they should only supply extra
information if it is worth the extra effort which readers would need to process it- the ‘relevance’ principle (cf. Pilkington 2000: 73–74). Here I felt that adding a
footnote about Stone Sleeper’s text world would be too disruptive. Moreover, with-
out it, I felt that readers would understand the extract as referring to the oppressed
and oppressors in general – the association most relevant to the communication
between E and English readers.
2.5.2 Emotion
Translating is driven not just by cognition, but also by emotion. For example, pos-
itive emotions, such as self-confidence, enjoyment, hopes and loyalty, increase
motivation; and negative emotions, such as self-doubt, dislike, fears and mistrust,
impede it (Schumann 1999). And because much poetry translation is done volun-
tarily, motivation helps make poetry translating happen. Without my sense of cap-
tivation for Kameni spavač, for instance, I would not have continued to translate it
independently for so long.