Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
A habitus implies norms – such as the allowable range of relevant similarities
between a source and target poem. However, neither is deterministic: agents can
renegotiate or even transgress both habitus and norms. Negotiation is perhaps
inevitable when different norms apply to an action, but are hard to reconcile with
each other. Thus reading a text written in one language and rewriting for a new
audience in another language are the two central actions of the translator’s habitus.
This implies, however, a double habitus for poetry translators. On the one hand,
they are (in the words of Derek, a translator from Chapter 4) “a mouthpiece, a
person through which [source poets] speak”. On the other hand, they are writers
who create a text that works solely in receptor-culture terms. This in turn implies
a spectrum of practices and norms, depending on the relative emphasis a poetry
translator gives to the former or latter habitus, as shown in Figure 5. Both are al-
ways present, however. Even translators who aim to be mouthpieces need to con-
sider how to communicate with a receptor-language audience, and even the freest
adaptations take a poem in another language as a point of reference.
As the Dizdar extract’s translator, I tried to balance both habitus. This involved
taking the compromises and alternatives offered because no one translation could
replicate all the source poem’s semantic and poetic features, and using them to
write a text that I hoped would replicate as many source features as possible while
working as English poetry (Jones 1989).
As Buzelin points out, translation is often “a site where different habitus inter-
act” (2005: 204, citing Inghilleri). Thus even technical translation involves a dou-
ble habitus, as source writer’s mouthpiece and receptor-language technical writer.
What appears to distinguish translating poetry from translating most other genres
is the attitude to textual equivalence – that is, degree and type of ‘sameness’. Achiev-
ing semantic and functional equivalence is central to the technical translator’s ha-
bitus, say. But the sheer variety of relationships between source and target poem
that seem allowed in the modern poetry translator’s habitus mean that, according
to Holmes, poetry translators should be seen as seeking not “equivalents” for
source-poem features, but target-language and target-culture “counterparts” and
“analogues” (1988: 9–10, 53–54; cf. Hollander, in Honig 1985: 25). Line 7’s cursed
cur, for instance, can be seen as a phonically similar but semantically loose-fit
counterpart of pas pseći.source
poet’s
mouthpiecereceptor
language
writerPoetry translator