Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

Chapter 4. Talks with translators 

Those who took a middle position on the Writer/Reader Orientation Contin-

uum described approaches that balanced both priorities. Thus Bruce said that

some of his text helpers checked whether his versions replicated source-poem fea-

tures: for example, “spotting a semantic thing [...] or an allusion I may have missed”.

Other helpers, however, checked for receptor-genre quality – looking, for example,

at the version’s rhythm: “has it become, you know, da-da-da, has it become too

kind-of mechanical?”

4.3.4.2 Poetic image and poetic form

Though translators attempted to recreate source-poem microstructures where

possible, sometimes they found this impossible, or felt that doing so would not

recreate a microstructure’s effect on source readers. Then translators applied “hier-

archies of correspondence”: priorities regarding what must be kept, and what can

be abandoned (Holmes 1988: 86; cf. Jones 1989). These also differed between

translators, giving Figure 21’s Correspondence-Hierarchy Continuum.

The main correspondence-hierarchy difference between these interviewees

was whether they should prioritize semantics, pragmatics and image, prioritize

poetic form, or balance both priorities – a debate echoed in many published ac-

counts (e.g. Dacier 1699/2006; Cowper 1791/2006; Goethe 1811–1814/2006;

Newman 1856/2006; Lefevere 1975; Barnstone 1984; Holmes 1988; Feldman 1997;

Moffett 1999; Sorrell 2000; Dahlgren 2005). Most translators were ‘balancers’ here,

trying to convey both. Ellen, for example, felt that it was important to convey the

source poet’s style, which involved both lexical and sound patterns, and said she

normally began by analysing these; and when she revised her first versions, she

claimed to focus on both word-meaning and sound.

Just one translator (Derek) prioritized semantics: “I’m a sense man, yes, sense

rather than form”. In his opinion, this is because semantics shapes “sequence of

images”, which is a poem’s “central content”, and that it determines a poem’s prag-

matic and emotional force:

You have to be able to react to the language, get the feeling across, the image

across, get – let’s say in some of them – the suffering across. [...] So, the impulse of

wanting to get [all this] across, dictates the strategy.

Prioritising semantics, pragmatics, images Prioritising poetic form

Derek Alan

Bruce

Ellen

Carl

Figure 21. Correspondence-Hierarchy Continuum