Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
3.4.2 FieldsTeam players are also involved in wider networks, such as professional or expert-
community fields. Fields are elastic and overlapping concepts. This survey’s trans-
lators, for instance, could be seen as belonging to various fields – such as ‘poetry
translation’, ‘BCS → English poetry translation’, or ‘English-language literary pro-
duction’ – depending on whom they happen to be interacting with. In practice,
poetry translation fields seem made up of interpersonal networks, centred around
key players, particularly translators and source poets, and extending across differ-
ent projects. These map, however fuzzily, a field’s scope: within it, actors’ networks
repeatedly overlap; outside it, overlap is much less. Meanwhile, actions along these
second-order networks (translating poems, for instance) shape a field’s features,
like its habitus and ideologies.
Some such networks link translators with other translators, via direct ‘co-
working’, as with co-translating, or via indirect ‘co-occurrence’, as when different
translators participate in the same project(s) or translate the same poet(s). Other
networks link translators with poets, or with editors and publishers. These second-
order networks grow out of contacts in first-order teams. As each player’s web of
contacts grows, each new project becomes more likely to re-use all or part of a
network from earlier projects – when translators recycle translations from a jour-
nal into a later book, for instance, or when (like Browne and Tate) they repeatedly
form co-translating partnerships.
With more tightly defined fields, such as poetry translation from one region
into one language, some translators’ extended networks might well involve most
fellow field members. For instance, few people combine adequate BCS poetry-
reading with adequate English poetry-writing skills, or have the contacts to do so
in a co-translating partnership. And even if more people have such expertise
(as with English → German, say), the high time plus low pay involved in poetry
translation restricts numbers still further. World-wide, therefore, there are proba-
bly not many more Bosnian → English poetry translators than the 44 identified
here, whereas the 59 projects identified, many involving multiple translators, gave
them plentiful opportunities to work with or alongside their fellow translators and
other key actors. Here, Bosnian → English is arguably again a far-from-untypical
translation direction.
Moreover, though translators are not necessarily the most powerful actors in
individual projects, the extended networks of experienced translators and transla-
tor-editors are crucial in binding projects into the field of poetic communication
from one language culture into another. Hence Zabic and Kamenish name five
“dedicated experts”, all of them translators with high publication outputs, as cru-
cial “catalysts” in communicating BCS poetry to North America (2006). Not all