chapter 4
Talks with translators
4.1 Introduction: The translator’s-eye-view
This chapter shifts its focus to the translator as subject. Its data derive from inter-
views with five poetry translators about their working practices, focusing on the
central cognitive task of how they translate poems. Strictly speaking, however, in-
terview data are metacognitive: they show not what translators do, but what they
think they do (Creswell 2003: 168; Leonard 2003). Hence the interviews give par-
ticularly valuable insights into how translators conceptualize their practice, and
how these conceptualizations relate to second-order habitus and norms. Inter-
views also enable interviewees to contextualize their action. Thus the translators
also talk about what motivates them to enter or initiate translation projects, how
they do so, and how they liaise with publishers and work with translating agents.
In all these respects, this chapter lays a basis for Chapters 5 and 6, which examine
how poetry translators actually translate.
4.2 Methods: Interviewing translators
I, as interviewer, randomly recruited five interviewees from my own second-order
network of fellow poetry translators. Their alphabetical pseudonyms are Alan,
Bruce, Carl, Derek and Ellen. All have at least 14 years’ poetry-translating experi-
ence. All have also had at least one single-translator book of poetry published, or
had contributed to several paper anthologies. They work from Czech, Danish,
Dutch, German, Polish, Russian, Swedish and/or Turkish into UK English, their
mother tongue. They combine translating poetry with university lecturing
(Alan, Bruce and Ellen), with translating prose (Bruce and Derek), and with writ-
ing English-language poetry (Alan and Derek).
The translators were all asked the same initial questions, thus ensuring com-
parable answers. To my knowledge, only one other published poetry-translation
study does this: Flynn’s interviews with twelve English-to-Dutch translators (2004),