Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

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No mention Bibliog. only Positive Mixed Negative

Translation mentions and quality judgements

Number of reviews

Figure 14. Reviewers’ mentions and judgements of translation

Figure 14 shows that translation was unmentioned in 37% (16/43) of reviews, and

in a further 7% (3/43) it was only signalled with the words “translated by” in the

project’s bibliographic details. The remaining 56% of reviews (24/43) did discuss

translation-related issues. This always involved judgements of the translation’s

quality or purpose. Two-thirds of judgements were positive (16/24).

Quality judgements often assessed the translations’ loyalty to their sources,

though only two reviewers based their assessments on source-language knowl-

edge. Both criticized translations of mine (Dizdar 1973/1999: 65, 173), focusing

on loyalty to source-poem style and ideology rather than to semantics: reviewers

felt I had lost “the original brilliance of [Dizdar’s] innovation” (Schwartz 2004) or

“the intention of the author that Bosnia is a symbol of beauty, mystery, sensitivity”

(Telalović 2000).

Other reviewers contrasted two teams’ versions of the same Goran Simić

poems (1996, 1997, 2005): David Harsent’s reworkings of Amela Simić’s literals,

and Amela Simić’s solo versions. Basing their assessments this time on Transla-

tor’s Introductions that explained each translator’s approach, reviewers again

favoured those versions (here, Amela Simić’s) which most closely reflected

source-poem style. Thus Harsent was criticized for having ‘normalized’ his ver-

sions to suit his idea of target readers’ tastes (cf. Jones 1999; Wuilmart 1999) by

adding and deleting text, with stylistic disloyalty again being linked to ideologi-

cal disloyalty: