Chapter 4. Talks with translators
issues just once in the interviews, and then to justify selecting poets whose voice
was stifled, not to justify translating poems in a certain way. Similarly, no inter-
viewees felt that the translator should become visible within the target poem by
shifts that highlight the translator’s intervention (Venuti 1995). Indeed, Derek, cit-
ing the common translation-as-pane-of-glass analogy, argued strongly for the
translator’s invisibility.4.4.2.2 Is there a ‘right’ relation norm?
Whether some preferences regarding writer ↔ reader orientation and semantic ↔
poetic loyalty might be ‘better’ than others has been a never-ending topic of debate
among poetry translators and their readers. This small sample of poetry translators
spanned a wide spectrum of positions within this debate, though none claimed
absolute validity for their position: it was simply what suited them. Anyway, each
translator’s priorities were not simple but multiple – prioritizing both semantics
and emotional-pragmatic texture, or trying to meet the competing demands of
semantics, stylistic texture and poetic form. And most importantly, all these trans-
lators had publication success and peer esteem. If these reliably indicate output
quality, all their reported positions, from strongly prioritising original-matching
and semantics to moderately prioritising poem-making and sound structure, are
equally acceptable. Different clients (here, publishers or editors), however, might
differ in their preferred product types across this range. Relation/textual-linguistic
norms, therefore, seem not to favour one product type (as implied in Toury 2000:
203), but to state a permissible range of practices for the poetry translator habitus,
within limits defined by a higher-level norm of accountability (‘be loyal to the
source poet’). This study suggests that a translator’s preferred focus within this
range depends, at least in part, on cognitive and interpersonal factors.
Interestingly, it seems not to depend directly on whether translators are also
receptor-language poets. Thus Derek and Alan, the two published poets, took
quite different positions in terms of Writer/Reader Orientation and Correspond-
ence Hierarchy (Figure 20, Figure 21), and both agreed with their non-poet peers
that unmotivated creative changes were unacceptable. Recent published transla-
tions in English, however, suggest that the few translators who do find such chang-
es acceptable are likely to be published poets who see translation as part of their
own poetic output (e.g. Mahon 2006; Paterson 2006).4.4.3 Emotion and motivationNon-literary research suggests that motivation, or “involvement in the translation
task” (Bernardini 2001: 251) can not only get and keep translators on task, but also
aid “successful performance” – perhaps because motivation increases time spent on