Chapter 4. Talks with translators
poem” (1988: 50). This reflects the mouthpiece + writer habitus proposed for po-
etry translators in Chapter 2 (Figure 5) – a habitus whose double nature Chapter 3’s
reviewers chose to ignore. In practice, achieving both aims satisfactorily is not al-
ways possible. Then just one translator was willing to abandon the poem-making
aim. No translators, however, were prepared to abandon the original-matching
aim entirely.
This was reflected in the lack of references to creative shifts. Using the source
poem to inspire a novel receptor-language poem was never mentioned. And cre-
atively reworking individual microstructures was seen only as a last resort, when
no poetically effective original-matches could be found – and even then, only by
some translators.
Holmes’s double aim also implies a cognitive double bind. Keeping source-text
microstructures in working memory whilst translating and revising is essential for
original-matching. But it can hinder poem-making, because it risks priming
(that is, cognitively predisposing) translators towards choosing direct equivalents
for source microstructures, thus blocking the more open-ended searches that
might yield more effective solutions (cf. Mackenzie 1998: 201; Ward et al. 1999: 198).
Some of the interviewees’ strategies for escaping this double bind reflect cognitive
orientation. Searching over several drafts for receptor-language microstructures
that reflect the original whilst being poetically effective, for example, is a more
analytic strategy. Conversely, letting source-poem microstructures fade from
working memory during drawer time before evaluating the last session’s whole
target-poem version is a more wholist strategy. There are also interpersonal strate-
gies, however, such as asking a target-poem advisor who does not know the source
language to generate poetically effective solutions, which the translator then eval-
uates in original-matching terms.4.4.2 Loyalty and norms
4.4.2.1 Loyalty, similarity and invisibility
Interviewees’ attitudes towards the source-target poem relationship reflect Nord’s
ethic of ‘loyalty’ (2001: 185, 200). This is a relationship of responsibility towards
the translator’s two key ‘partners’ in a translation-mediated communication event:
the source-message producer (and his/her communicative intent), and the target-
message receiver (and his/her communicative expectations). The interviewees, on
the evidence just mentioned, interpret this as the responsibility to give a reliable
representation of the source poem to receptor-culture readers. On the one hand,
this reflects the general translation ethic that translators should reliably represent
their (re)construction of a source writer’s communicative intent to a target reader.
On the other hand, it seems based on an shared ideology of poetry translation as