Poetry Translating as Expert Action
emotional and metacognitive engagement with projects and poems, including
their attitudes towards the source ↔ target-poem relationship. They also comple-
ment Chapter 3’s findings, however, in that they further explore translator identity,
and relationships within the project team and the wider field. These topics are
discussed below.4.4.1.1 Cognition and action
4.4.1.2 Continua and personae
Several of the continua proposed above echo information-processing continua
and classifications which have been reported for non-translation tasks. This in-
creases the likelihood firstly that interviewees’ reports reliably reflect their cogni-
tive preferences, and secondly that such preferences might condition the working
practices of other poetry translators.
Thus the Cognitive-Orientation Continuum reflects Riding and Rayner’s a n a-
lytic ↔ wholist meta-dimension of cognitive style (1998: 19–39). It also echoes the
‘thinking vs. feeling’ dichotomy, an element in the Jungian personality inventory;
here, Hubscher-Davidson reports that trainee literary translators who produce
high-quality output can be of either type (2007).
The Early-Version Wording Continuum between ‘alternative solutions’ and
‘pure line’ resembles Holzman and Klein’s ‘sharpening’↔‘levelling’ spectrum be-
tween preferring to keep different memory traces separate and preferring to merge
them (1954, in Riding and Rayner: 23–25). It may also be linked to ‘tolerance of
ambiguity’: high-ambiguity-tolerant personalities deal with complex situations by
keeping their options open, whereas low-ambiguity-tolerant personalities do so by
reducing potential distractions (Fraser 2000).
Finally, the Translating-Speed Continuum’s ‘steady’ and ‘speedy’ patterns re-
semble the two ‘skilled’ sub-types, ‘reflective’ and ‘quick’, of Kagan et al.’s ‘concep-
tual tempo’ (1964, in Riding and Rayner 1998: 25–26). They also echo the Jungian
‘judging vs. perceiving’ dichotomy, where Hubscher-Davidson again found that
high-output-quality translators could be of either type (2007). The interviews sug-
gest that high working speed does not necessarily guarantee endurance until pub-
lication, however. This implies that the translator’s physical and mental ‘energy
economy’ is a factor in the outcome of poetry translation projects, which are often
self-chosen and can take a long time to reach publication.4.4.1.3 Double aim, double bind
All five translators saw themselves as motivated by Holmes’s double aim: to make
a text which will “match the original to a large enough degree that it will be con-
sidered a translation”, but which will also be “considered as a [receptor-language]