Poetry Translating as Expert Action
intercultural ambassadorship. This sees the source poet as writing a message of
general-human and aesthetic value, and the translator as entrusted to relay this
message to target readers.
Chesterman’s three types of ‘process’ or ‘professional’ norms (1997: 67–70) are
useful here. Firstly, his ‘accountability norm’ describes how translators are expect-
ed to meet “the demands of loyalty” to source writer, to translation commissioner,
to target readers, and to themselves in an “appropriate” way. For these poetry
translators, loyalty to source writer is crucial, though this is modulated by loyalty
to target readers.
Secondly, Chesterman’s ‘communication norm’ requires translations to com-
municate optimally – which means, according to Hermans (1999: 78), conforming
to Grice’s ‘maxims’ of ‘quality’ (truthfulness), ‘quantity’ (expected text length), ‘re-
lation’ (relevance) and ‘manner’ (clarity). Here, the interviewees prioritize quality
and relation: reporting the source poet’s message truthfully, and reproducing what
they see as its most relevant aspects.
Thirdly, Chesterman’s ‘relation norm’, which provided Chapter 1’s definition of
a translation, specifies (like Toury’s ‘textual-linguistic norms’: 2000: 203) an “ap-
propriate relation of relevant similarity” between source and target texts, with the
exact relation depending on genre, client’s or source writer’s wishes, and reader’s
needs. The interviewees’ relation norm prioritizes “optimal similarity”, rejecting
other potential relations such as “adaptation” or “addition or omission of informa-
tion” (Chesterman 1997: 69–70). Thus their default aim is to seek maximum
equivalence at all levels of poetically relevant meaning (source-text macrostruc-
ture, microstructures, stylistic texture, poetic impact, etc.: Jones 1989), with the
semantics ↔ poetics Correspondence Hierarchy and Writer/Reader Orientation
continua showing what they reluctantly prioritize when they feel they cannot find
maximum equivalence – thus Carl, say, prioritizes the source-poem’s musical
“breath” above its exact semantics, and Derek the opposite. Chesterman (ibid.)
cites a wide range of genres where a relation norm of optimal similarity would be
appropriate: legal contracts, short stories, scientific/technical articles, brochures,
advertisements, but also poems. In relation-norm terms, therefore, poetry transla-
tion is close to many other translation genres. Indeed, whereas Chesterman sug-
gests that poetry translation is distinctive in prioritizing stylistic similarity as a
relation norm, this study shows that semantic similarity is central even for form-
oriented poetry translators.
This also indicates that Venuti’s favouring of close source-target correspond-
ence in terms of style and texture, and his rejection of modification towards recep-
tor-culture norms (1995, 1998), may be rooted in his own poetry translating expe-
rience. Unlike with Venuti, however, the interviewees’ ideological justification for
this was aesthetic rather than socio-political. Indeed, they mentioned socio-political