Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

In principle, rhythm and rhyme are independent poetic features. An earlier

study showed that recreating fixed-rhythm but unrhymed Lines rarely provoked

creative transformations – as rarely as recreating free-verse Lines, in fact

(Jones 2007). When rhythm and rhyme combined, creative transformations in-

creased sharply, suggesting that Rhyme work accounts for most semantic shifts. In

the Krik protocols, however, some creative transformations resulted from Rhyme

work (e.g. Line 11’s addition of in what arc: Figure 52), and some from Rhythm

work (e.g. Line 4’s change from the literal Am I feeling trees to Are my fingers brush-

ing at trees). Rhyme, therefore, prompts creative transformations in its own right,

but can also act as a catalyst to Rhythm transformations. This might be because

rhyme restricts word order by fixing a certain word at the end of each Line, mak-

ing it harder to solve Rhythm problems by reordering the Line – which in turn

increases the likelihood of creative transformations.

6.4.1.5 Other types of poem

The fact that the approach, strategies and processes described above are broadly

similar between the two poems implies that they would remain similar with other

poems where Jakobson’s poetic function is prominent. Thus one might expect

similar poem-management strategies and similar efforts to balance semantics,

style and poetic effect to be used when translating a poem like Li Po’s Yù jiē yuàn

(p. 1). Like Toen wij, this uses polysemous lexis, and like Krik, it uses syllabic

rhythm – the extreme tightness of which (five content words in five syllables)

would compensate for any loss of difficulty caused by its lack of rhyme.

At first sight, these two studies say less about other intrinsic-form challenges,

such as the source-culture-specific allusions in Yù jiē yuàn. Translators may well

tackle these similarly to the real-world and text-world references in Toen wij – im-

plying a high reliance on Image micro-sequences, for instance, to check potential

solutions. However, the two studies also suggest that when a translator tackles a

poem presenting a new set of problems, he or she would mainly use processes

common to all poem-types, plus a smaller proportion of processes specialized in

tackling those precise problems. As for poems which present few or no tricky in-

trinsic-form problems, one may well expect patterns like those in the less prob-

lematic lines of Toen wij, plus a reduction in overall translating time.

6.4.2 The world outside the poem: Team, project and ideology

The change of setting from Toen wij’s workshop to Krik’s published project left no

traces in the think-aloud protocols. These were again exclusively concerned with

poem re-creation, with no reference to interpersonal, situational or ideological

factors that did not impinge on poem re-creation. This implies that translating