Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

Emotion also gives “an evaluation of the environmental conditions based on

the meanings for action as they appear to the individual” (Axel 1997: 142, empha-

sis removed): it determines how one views actors and settings around oneself, and

how one should act in relation with them. Thus, in the case study, cooperation

between myself and essayist E was initially inspired by shared emotions of outrage

at the war situation.

Moreover, emotional relations between actors can influence the success of an

existing project, and its power to generate new projects. Hence the positive work-

ing relationships developed in the essay project enabled E and myself to cooperate

on other projects.

2.5.3 Creativity

Creativity has been defined as “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e.,

original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task con-

straints)” (Sternberg and Lubart 1999: 3; cf. Funk, in Heiden 2005: 449; Weisberg,

in Fontanet 2005: 433). Heiden adds that novelty might also involve recombining

existing, non-original concepts or information-sources (451).

This helps explain why poetry translation is often popularly seen as ‘creative’.

Translators may feel that reproducing all the semantic content and poetic features

in a source poem is impossible, or that doing so might confuse the messages being

signalled in the poems. In both cases, by altering, adding or deleting certain ele-

ments, or by changing their relative emphasis, translators bring something novel

to the translated poem – but these actions are conditioned by what translator con-

siders as appropriate. In Lines 3 and 4 (Do samog dna/I pada), for example, I

adapted the literal ‘To the very bottom/And a/the fall’ into Till all/Fall, in order to

give a rhyme on the last word of the verse. Thus novelty (changing Line 3’s seman-

tics and Line 4’s syntax) was driven by appropriacy (making a receptor-culture

poem reflecting the source poem’s form).

Creativity also underlies English poetry translator John Dryden’s three trans-

lation “types” – that is, approaches (1680/2006):

• Semantically faithful ‘metaphrase’. This is non-novel, and hence – following
  the definition above – non-creative.


• ‘Paraphrase’, where the source poet’s “words are not so strictly followed as his
  sense, and that too is admitted to be amplified, but not altered”. This describes
  the creative change just mentioned, where I set myself the crucial appropriacy
  constraint of staying within the source lines’ broader “sense” of ‘total fall’,
  whilst novelly “amplifying” (in this case, modifying) the sub-meaning of
  ‘maximum depth’ into ‘affecting everything’.