Poetry Translating as Expert Action
This chapter’s study confirms that an actor’s power may be viewed in various
ways. Recruiting many other actors, like Essayist E in Chapter 2, puts an actor at
the centre of a project’s organization (see also Jones 2009: 311–317). In multi-poet
translation projects, most recruitment chains originate from the editor: see
Figure 6. In single-living-poet projects, they originate from the poet. In single-
dead-poet projects, they originate from the translator, or from a translator plus an
editor. In informal web publishing, recruitment power is shared between the tar-
get poem, which inspires a publisher to post it, and the publisher her- or himself.
The present study also shows that playing multiple roles can give translators
more recruitment power. In Figure 6, individual translators recruited little, pro-
ducing just a few target poems each; but those who were also poem reviewers
added to their network power by producing reports that affected the editor’s selec-
tion decisions.
Power may also be viewed in terms of symbolic, social or economic capital –
which may be independent of network recruitment power. Scar on the Stone used
a common co-translating pattern, pairing a source-language linguist as 1st-co-
translator with receptor-language poets as 2nd-co-translators. But though all 2nd-
co-translators are named on Scar on the Stone’s back cover (“The translators are
themselves leading poets from Britain, Ireland and America, including [...] Ted
Hughes, Kathleen Jamie, Ruth Padel [...]”), 1st co-translator Glavinić is not. The
aim here was presumably to use the prestige of actors like UK Poet Laureate Ted
Hughes to promote the book’s cultural value, thus increasing sales income – that
is, to convert some of their symbolic capital into cultural and economic capital for
the project. The 1st-co-translator, despite her crucial team role of producing liter-
als for all 2nd-co-translators, had no previous UK publications, and therefore no
convertible capital.^7
Translating agents themselves, however, recognize the importance of both co-
translators. Hence 2nd co-translator David Harsent, though cited on the title page
as the sole translator of Goran Simić’s The Sorrow of Sarajevo (1996: viii), writes in
his Foreword that he is “greatly indebted” to 1st co-translator Amela Simić. Simi-
larly, section headings in Scar on the Stone name the poet in question, plus both
2nd and 1st co-translators.3.3.2.3 Space, allegiance and identity
A team exists in various physical spaces, depending on where players come from,
work, and feel allegiance to. The interaction between these three ‘locations’- I, as a ‘linguist’ translator rather than a receptor-language poet, am also named on the back
cover, citing my previously-published translations of leading (high-capital) Serbian poets. This
supports the interpretation that what counts is actors’ pre-existing capital.