Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

Writer-oriented, microstructure focus Reader-oriented, text-quality focus

Derek Ellen Bruce Alan

Carl

Figure 20. Writer/Reader Orientation Continuum

emotional identification with source-poem content is important: for instance,

that it helps to have personally experienced “the peak and the abyss”, the extremes

of emotion and life events, which characterize many of his source poems.

Conversely, the creative reworking of individual microstructures was rarely men-

tioned – and then never for its own sake, but only as a way of increasing reliable

representation overall.

Translators might aim, however, to represent either the poet’s writing of a poem,

the reader’s reading, or both: Figure 20’s Writer/Reader Orientation Continuum. At

the ‘writer-oriented’ extreme, translators aim to recreate the microstructures writ-

ten by the source poet, be these microstructures of lexis and grammar, or of poetic

form and style. At the ‘reader-oriented’ extreme, translators aim to recreate the

source readers’ reading experience, which implies prioritizing the target readers’

reading experience; since (as stated or implied by all interviewees) source poems

are usually well written, this means a strong concern for target-poem quality.

The most writer-oriented interviewee was Derek, who cited almost exclusively

strategies for understanding and reproducing the source poet’s intent. Nevertheless,

when explaining why he translates poetry, he said his aim was to communicate the

poetic and general-human value of the source work, poet and culture – showing

some consideration of the target reader, and thus giving him an only moderate-left

position in Figure 20.

No interviewees advocated even moderate reader-orientation: the wish to rec-

reate source-poem microstructures remains a constant. At most, the poet Alan

was slightly reader-oriented in his belief that target-poem quality should be pri-

oritized slightly above source-poem microstructures – though only when it is im-

possible to represent both:

to me, the first [...] importance of a translation is that it should read as well as a

poem in its target language as it did in its original. So [...], given an absolute push,

then you would sacrifice on notions of faithfulness.

Thus he claimed he “almost never tried to repeat” the source poem’s sound-struc-

tures in his translated versions, but aimed for analogous effects. The example he

gave, however – replacing vowel rhyme by alliteration – shows that these shifts

were relatively minor.