Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
- ‘Imitation’, where “the translator [...] assumes the liberty not only to vary from
the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion”. This de-
scribes the ‘adaptations’ mentioned earlier.
A translator’s approach within any one poem, I suspect, is likely to be hybrid, com-
bining two or even three types, depending on the challenge being tackled. Thus, in
the Dizdar excerpt, I use metaphrase where I feel it is poetically effective (e.g. Ti
ništa ne znaš o gradu u kome ja živim → You know nothing of the town I live in), I use
paraphrase where I feel metaphrase would not be effective, but I avoid imitation.
Heiden (2005: 449–450) and Fontanet (2005: 433) also see creative translation
solutions as not obtainable by “routine procedures” such as terminological or doc-
umentary research. This implies that altering Crknut će (‘will die’) into Will be slain
in order to rhyme with pain (lines 8–9) was not really creative, because I obtained
slain via a thesaurus search on die. Whether restricting creativity to intuitive, self-
reliant research processes is justified will be discussed in Chapter 5.2.5.4 Metacognition
Metacognition normally refers to awareness of one’s own cognitive states and
processes (cf. Wenden 2001). It may also be seen, however, as a set of skills that
manages all aspects of subjectivity: cognition, but also emotion, relation and ac-
tion. Several types of metacognitive skills appear relevant to poetry translators.
One is that of coordinating cognitive skills and physical action: for example, balanc-
ing the need to revise to a good target-genre standard against deadline pressures.
Another is that of managing brief, skopos and translating approach (Flynn 2004:
280–282). ‘Skopos’ is the purpose and setting of the communication act as input to
translation decisions (Schäffner 1998). While revising the extract, for instance, I
had to balance two rather different desires: to produce a quote that supported the
essay (implicit in the editing brief ), and to signal Dizdar’s status as a major poet,
including the multi-voiced nature of Kameni spavač (central to my poetry translat-
ing approach). Metacognitive skills may also manage affective evaluations: for
example, letting the emotions described above motivate me to translate, whilst
trying not to let them unduly affect my translating approach. Finally, they may
also manage relations with others – with essayist E, for example.2.6 First-order networks
The translator, source poems and target poems are linked into a first-order net-
work of text production, as sketched in Figure 4. Here I examine other aspects of
this network.