Poetry Translating as Expert Action
2.8.1 Background and identities
A poetry translator’s background – experience as a writer (Born 1993: 62), wider
personal history, place of upbringing, etc. – potentially affects what he or she does,
and how. For instance, I was born in Yorkshire, and like most educated Yorkshire
speakers, I pronounce laugh as /laf/. This led me to construct Lines 16–19 round
two pairs of vowel rhymes (/laf – am/ and /rà: – mà:/): And you’ll laugh you’ll roar/
That I am/No more. A speaker of Southern English, however, would pronounce
laugh as /l":f/, and therefore might have translated the lines differently. However,
the external facts of ‘what, when, where’ are less important for social action than
who we think we are – that is, than images and narratives of identity. Crucial,
therefore, was that I think of myself as a Yorkshireman, and thus semi-deliberately
use that accent rather than the more standard Southern English – that is, ‘perform’
my Yorkshire identity – in my poetry translations.
Identity may be seen as generated and negotiated within and between the sub-
ject, members of relevant networks, and those outside such networks but judging
their members (Jenkins 1996: 14–23). This implies that identities are not fixed la-
bels, but mental schemata that may shift and multiply depending on the context in
which they are negotiated or highlighted (Hall, in House et al. 2005: 4). Working
with others on the essay project, for instance, reinforced my existing identity as a
poetry translator, helped construct my emerging identity as Dizdar’s English trans-
lator, and revived my dormant identity as a European citizen.
Nevertheless, ‘speaking for’ a source poet is central to the habitus of poetry
translators. This implies that performing the source poet’s identity is seen as more
important than performing one’s own, at least in the translated poem (the transla-
tor’s identity may be more prominent in paratexts such as a translator’s introduc-
tion, which was absent from the essay collection). Hence I hope, as a poetry trans-
lator, that Dizdar’s stylistic voice (his use of rhyme and archaism, for instance) is
more prominent than mine in the target extract (Figure 3). The ethic of effacing
the translator’s persona from the text and merely reflecting the poet’s persona is
criticized by Venuti in The Translator’s Invisibility (1995: 272ff ); his analyses of his
own translations, however, often focus on finding the most effective target-lan-
guage counterparts for the source poet’s voice.2.8.2 Culture and community
Culture has been mentioned several times in this chapter, reflecting its common
use in translation-studies discourse. Culture is traditionally seen as involving two
nesting concepts: firstly, a community’s beliefs, products, customs, and behaviours;
and secondly, a sub-set of ‘canonical’ products which are highly valued by this