Poetry Translating as Expert Action
then move gradually outwards into fields, interest networks, textual systems and
imagined communities.3.4.1 Projects, teams and players
This survey shows clearly how producing poetry translations is teamwork, not
lone action by a translator. This confirms Chapter 2’s case study, plus existing re-
ports for poetry and novels across various language pairs, where translators are
just one link in a “complex chain of mediators” (Casanova 2002/2010; cf. Flynn
2004: 278; Buzelin 2004: 737–739; Jones and Arsenijević 2005: 84–85; Jones 2009:
305, 2010). Poetry translation teams involve multiple mediators, each performing
one or more roles linked into a network of solo or joint actions: approaching a
publisher, selecting source poets, writing literal or poetic translations, writing an
introductory essay, etc.
These actions are driven ultimately by a project’s underlying motive. In the
survey, this was not only to promote source-language poems, but also – implicitly
or explicitly – to promote a certain vision of the source country’s cultural and even
socio-political status. This too may often apply to other countries than those sur-
veyed here: Barnaby, for instance, claims that anthologies of translated poetry
typically “offer a state-of-the-nation survey or a potted social history of the source
culture” and therefore have “potential for both challenging and reinforcing preju-
dices and stereotypes” (2002: 86, after Kaszynski).
Some players are ‘lead actors’ within their team, with power to influence the
project’s aims, team structure, working methods, and outcomes. Translators are lead
actors in relatively few projects: typically, those featuring one dead poet. With the
more common multi-poet, single-living-poet and informal-web-publishing project-
types, the lead actor is usually the editor, the poet or the publisher respectively.
What players do, however, is more important than their role label. If transla-
tors simply translate pre-chosen poems, like most 2nd-co-translators in Scar on
the Stone, their influence operates only within the target poems. Of course, trans-
lating is the central, essential action in any project, and its success is crucial for
readers’ perceptions of project quality: hence it is the main focus of Chapters 4–6.
However, translators gain wider influence over the project’s aims and outcomes if
they also perform editorial actions – such as seeking a publisher, choosing poets
or poems, or writing a critical introduction and notes. Sometimes these actions
seem recognized as secondary aspects of the poetry translator’s habitus. Converse-
ly, they may be so extensive that translating is just one aspect of the editor role, as
in the folk-poem collections. When a team contains both an editor and translators,
translators may also act as ‘assistant editors’ – as poem reviewers in Scar on the
Stone, for instance. How often translators do so is hard to quantify, because this