Poetry Translating as Expert Action
Trying to reproduce patterns of rhyme and rhythm, Derek believes, risks changing
or losing this. Other risks are of “padding” (expanding otherwise succinct target-
text lines) to replicate source-text rhythms, and that such rhythms might “sound
extremely weird” in the target language. Lack of expertise or confidence was a
personal reason: “I am not able to rhyme poetry in translation”, even though “I can
happily rhyme my own poetry”.
Conversely, just one translator (Carl) prioritized poetic form. His aim to con-
vey the musical “breath” or “heartbeat” of the source, driven by a strong conscious-
ness of the “sound patterns” and “sound texture” of the emerging target version,
made him willing to bend source-poem semantics: “very often I will choose a
word even though the meaning may be slightly different, because of its sound or
its shape or its length”. Nevertheless, even for Carl, reflecting source-poem seman-
tics remained important: meaning-changes driven by poetic form were “slight”,
and he used strategies such as informant feedback to check for semantic corre-
spondence between source and target poem.4.3.4.3 Non-standard style
Turning now to ‘minoritizing’ varieties (i.e. non-mainstream sub-systems of a lan-
guage which challenge stylistic norms: Venuti 1996), no interviewees felt it was
appropriate to use a regional target-language variety as the main code of a trans-
lated poem. Some translators viewed occasional regionalisms (regionally-marked
words or expressions) as acceptable when translating regionally-marked source
poems, however – if translators could write analogous receptor-language regional-
isms, and if general target readers would understand them. Similarly, just two
translators felt that ‘superficial archaization’ (occasionally using forms still extant
in the target language but marked as old-fashioned: Jones and Turner 2004:
166–167) was sometimes acceptable, whether to signal an older source poem’s age,
or a modern source poet’s deliberate stylistic use of archaisms.
Ellen added that:
modern poetry [...] tends to be colloquial, to have idiosyncrasies in it of expres-
sion and so, often, the odd dialect word in the translation actually can add to that
sense of closeness between poet and reader, even if there aren’t any actually dialect
words in the original.In other words, a non-standard source-text variety’s effect (e.g. using colloquial
language to signal “closeness”) can be recreated by a different “domestic remainder”,
or non-standard receptor-language variety (e.g. dialect: Venuti 2000). Ideologically,
however, interviewees’ advocacy of non-standard target discourse is based on aes-
thetic concerns. No interviewees mentioned Venuti’s socio-political motivation: to