Poetry Translating as Expert Action
3.4.3.2 Translation in reviewers’ eyes
Reviews also indicated readers’ views on how translation affected their poetry
reading experience. The survey’s reviewers, though often literary writers, were
never (to my knowledge) poetry translators. Hence many simply ignored the
translated status of the poems reviewed, thus signalling the source poet as their
sole producer (cf. Keeley 2000: 25; Fawcett 2000: 295–296). This may partially re-
flect the low external visibility of translators in text complexes reviewed. But as
close reading of translated poetry almost always reveals named translators, this
implies that these reviewers did not regard the translators as worth mentioning.
Such reviews, therefore, actively promote to other target readers the translator’s
exclusion from the reading experience.
When reviewers did mention translation, they usually evaluated it. Here they
engaged with one of the two translator habitus proposed in Figure 5 (p. 42). Some
focused on the translators’ effectiveness as source poet’s mouthpiece – evaluating, for
instance, how translators had reproduced the source poem’s style or ideological con-
tent. Others focused on their effectiveness as receptor-language writers – evaluating,
for instance, the translators’ output style (cf. Fawcett 2000: 296, 301). But the two
viewpoints never coexisted: no reviewers mentioned, for example, less-than-exact
source-poem reproduction being mitigated by good target-language style. Hence
there is no evidence that reviewers see poetry translators as having a double habitus.
Evaluations were mainly positive. Several of the negative evaluations, however,
confirmed Fawcett’s observation that literary-translation reviewers make “fre-
quently harsh judgments [...] on the basis of one theoretically-ungrounded tenet”
(2000: 305) – that archaization is a priori unacceptable in poetry, for example.3.4.4 Poetry translation systems
Reviews and publishing practices also indicate the translated poems’ position in
textual systems. Since reviewers are often receptor-culture poets or critics, their
reviews can help to place translation projects in the receptor literary system, and
may even advocate expanding the system with further projects (a book featuring a
poet hitherto only anthologized, for instance). With living source poets, position-
ing projects is often inseparable from introducing the poets – whether as source-
country or immigrant receptor-country poets – into the reviewers’ own receptor-
culture literary network, or from confirming their place in that network.
Conversely, paratext writers and anthology editors often place poems and
poets, or confirm their position, in source-culture systems and fields – using web-
page titles to define Bosnian poets as ‘Balkan’, say. With anthologies featuring po-
ets from various countries, editors and reviewers may even position source poets
and poems in an ‘international poetry’ field or polysystem respectively.