Poetry Translating as Expert Action
between the other two patterns, ‘front-loading’ vs. more ‘even-loading’, could not
be proved statistically. Moreover, recording just three drafts ensured comparability
across translators, but meant that actual drafting behaviour was under-reported.
All translators reported doing incidental revision between drafts; Hugo, as men-
tioned, did a full extra draft; I had a session with a Dutch-native informant be-
tween Drafts 2 and 3^10 ; and Geoff added that, besides the “four or five intensive
drafts” mentioned earlier, he would normally “look at [a poem] many more times,
maybe just reading through and maybe just changing a word, or putting in an al-
ternative to think about” if he were translating for publication. Hence, especially
with data from just five translators, any conclusions about inter-translator differ-
ences must remain tentative.
5.3.3 Runs-through
Translators averaged 4.0 runs-through per draft. There was no significant tenden-
cy for some drafting sessions, or some translators, to produce shorter runs-through
than others^11. Individual runs-through, however, varied widely in length with
each translator: see Figure 35. Translating and revising, therefore, did not involve
a series of steady passes through the poem, but were managed by a combination of
quick, whole-text overviews and slow, intensive, detailed work-throughs. This is
shown by following one translator, Irene, through her three drafts.
In Draft 1, Irene’s pre-reading phase involved three runs-through. In RT1
(14tu/1m: see Figure 35) she quickly read out the poem “to get an idea of the
rhythm”. In RT2 (72tu/6m), she established the poem’s text world, using three
knowledge-sources:
- Linguistic knowledge, as with the Line 1 idiom:
TU32 over het hart streken:
TU33 doe je vaak met een kind, je [you often do with a child, you] you turn a blind eye,
so to speak, in English,
TU34 you give in. - Intertextual knowledge of the poet’s oeuvre:
TU44 oud vlees: this is a typical Kouwenaar sort of turn of phrase.
TU45 Talking about not your old bodies, but your old flesh. - Real-world knowledge about the poem’s inspiration, from the session with the
source poet as informant.
- This was recorded but – for consistency’s sake – not used in this study.
- One-way ANOVA: F 1.49, p 0.24 (drafts); F 0.93, p 0.45 (translators).