Poetry Translating as Expert Action
written by the editor). Two reasons might be suggested for these effects. One is the
higher social value given to original than to derivative literary work, which would
favour source poets. Another is the bibliographic convention which highlights po-
ets in single-poet publications, and editors in anthologies. Both would tend to
make translators less externally visible. Indeed, a 1999 survey of small US literary
presses (cited by Keeley 2000: 45–48) reported that half usually left the translator’s
name off the book cover, and most usually omitted it from publicity.
Translators were not always externally invisible, however. One factor which
could increase their external visibility was suggested in the reviews survey: the
high value put by readers on a target poem’s stylistic quality, and their recognition
that this is the translator’s responsibility. Another is the translator’s symbolic capi-
tal gained from earlier translations or original poetic texts judged to be of high
quality. In a co-translating partnership, however, both factors would favour 2nd
above 1st co-translators. This is probably a key reason why the former are often the
more externally visible (cf. Csokits 1989, Hughes 1989).3.4.1.1 Project space and allegiance
Most projects in the survey involved transnational teams working across a distrib-
uted space, which typically spanned the source country and the country of publi-
cation (though sometimes other regions too, as with Scar on the Stone). Transla-
tors’ accounts suggest that poetry translation as distributed action is common in
other language pairs (e.g. Dumitrescu 1995, Keeley 2000; cf. Tymoczko 2003:
198–200). Similarly, a follow-up to this survey, adding English translations of Ser-
bian poetry over the same period, indicates that wartime solidarity networks made
transnational teams particularly common in Bosnia; but even though Serbia was
internationally isolated during the 1990s, because of its ethnonationalist regime
that sponsored or ordered among the most brutal excesses of the Yugoslav wars,
just 29% of Serbian-poetry teams involved only Serbs (Jones 2010).
Many of this survey’s players had multiple geographic allegiances. Some, like
editor Agee or translator Browne, were receptor-country natives whose action ap-
peared inspired by allegiance to the source culture, following Lévinas’s urging that
“we must use the ontological” – that is, our technological and organizing abilities- “for the sake of the other” (quote in Campbell 1998: 191, original emphasis).
Some, like editor Agee or translator Amela Simić, had a hybrid location, coming
from one geographic place but based in another. Interestingly, these were often
lead actors within their teams. This reflects Werbner’s claim that diaspora players’
dislocated but dual identity is a source of power: as cosmopolitans who retain
“imagined attachments to place of origin” (2002: 120,199), their networks span
both the host country and kod nas, while their actions are inspired by a sense of
mission for the latter, back-home culture.