Poetry Translating as Expert Action
7.2.2 Cognition: Translating and managing the translation task
Poems are complex texts. Hence translating them involves a complex set of skills
and strategies, in which overall progress is painstaking, slow and largely analytic.7.2.2.1 Understanding and communicating poetic text
The core skills and strategies are textual. Poetry translators need sophisticated
source-poem reading skills, to identify not only surface semantics, but also under-
lying imagery, idiom and allusion, plus the form and function of intrinsic-poetic
and stylistic features. They also need expert writing skills in a highly specialist
target genre, plus need the strategic ability to decide how their reading should in-
fluence their writing.
While translators translate, they constantly construct, refer to and modify
structures of linguistic, genre and world knowledge within and about the source
poem, and use these to shape the emerging target version and its own text world.
Relevant knowledge may derive from within the poem, outside it, or both (as when
Fleur contrasted the literal hung around us, which described the smoke in the
poem, with her wider knowledge that Kouwenaar’s poems often involve a negotia-
tion between self and surroundings). An important knowledge schema is the
translator’s reconstruction of the source poet’s intent, though this does not neces-
sarily override evidence from the source poem. Thus, when the lexical meanings
of a source idiom (‘stroking our hearts’ + ‘leniency’) differed from the poet’s expla-
nation of its meaning (relief at having finally bought a house), four translators
followed the former, and only one the latter. The translators might have been influ-
enced here by an awareness that a poet’s intent may be modified by the opportuni-
ties and constraints of the source language^1 (e.g. by an appealing idiom), or that a
poet’s explanations can have an element of textual re-interpretation, just as trans-
lators themselves often interpret a poem’s underlying meanings from textual evi-
dence. Nevertheless, all this supports ‘Cognitive Poetics’ models of literary reading
as communication between writer and reader within a real-world context, rather
than ‘New Criticism’ models, which regard reading as relying solely on informa-
tion within the text (Stockwell 2002; Matterson and Jones 2000: 73–78).
Moreover, the poetry translators examined here apparently follow the cogni-
tive-poetics model of translation as double or reported communication, in which
their second communication (writing the target poem) aims to report on the first
(their reading of the source poem). In this model, the first message changes be-
cause it is transmitted onwards not only in a new language with new opportunities
and constraints, but also by a new writer communicating in a new context with- Boase-Beier, personal communication