Poetry Translating as Expert Action
The ‘translational stylistics’ approach often used in recent translation scholar-
ship assumes that analysing translators’ stylistic choices can reveal their ideologi-
cal and cultural beliefs, and the ideological and cultural context in which they
were working (Munday 2006: 23). In my English versions of Krik, however, it is
also hard to find textual clues to my and the project team’s political and cultural
assumptions and ideologies. There is an intriguing exception, where the Northern-
English historical term reiving signals an ideology linked not to the project’s un-
derlying object, but to my own identity as its translator. Nevertheless, the fact that
obvious links between socio-political ideology and textual choices in translating
Krik are so few suggests that socio-political and intercultural ideologies operate
largely in the context in which a team produces translations and in which recep-
tor-culture readers read it (the areas addressed in Chapter 3), and much less in the
translated text. The nature of the poem, however, might well be a variable here.
Kulenović’s sonnets describe a “mind without a world” (“um bez sveta”:
Konstantinović 1983: 310) and therefore without a socio-political context. When
poems engage explicitly or implicitly with socio-political issues, however, their
translations might be more likely to carry traces of their translator’s own socio-
political stance. Nevertheless, even in the highly politicized Poruka/Message ex-
tract from Chapter 2, few traces were found that unequivocally showed the trans-
lator’s socio-political stance, as opposed to word-sound decisions, say.6.5 Afterword
This Chapter has presented the last of this book’s five empirical studies. These have
established a provisional model of poetry translating and then explored it in depth,
working gradually inwards from the social context of translating, via perceptions
of translators about their working practices, to a detailed scrutiny of how transla-
tors actually translate poems. The next and final Chapter integrates these explora-
tions into an overall model of poetry translating as personal, interpersonal and
poetic action.