Chapter 7. Conclusion
new readers. This model also implies that translators follow the relevance princi-
ple, weighing the target reader’s potential gains in richness of poetic experience
against the potential reading effort involved in getting them (Gutt 2000: 31). Here,
for instance, Hugo’s when we decided to have a heart might seem to favour poetic
richness above reader accessibility (using an English reactivated idiom without a
clear text-world motivation), and Irene’s when we passed our hands over our heart
to favour the opposite. Furthermore, it implies that poetry translators are aware of
what knowledge their target readers might have, and therefore how the latter
might interpret the target poem.
This book’s studies confirm that translators are at least sometimes aware of
their readers. Mostly, however, this is subsumed into a general intuition for what
output ‘feels right’. Thus translators often simply assume that target readers will
have the knowledge or literary competence to interpret references within poems:
the published version of Georg Trakl on the Battlefield Revisited, 1993 (Duraković,
tr. Glavinić and Ní Dhomhnaill: Agee 1998b: 106), for example, does not explain
who Georg Trakl was (contrast my own footnote to the poem on p. 53). This is
probably because poetry is more ‘writer-centred’ than ‘reader-centred’ as a genre:
in contrast to technical manuals, for example, the stress in poetry is on the quality
of the writer’s message rather than on its accessibility to the reader. For Walter
Benjamin, writing as a poetry translator, this meant that one should not aim at
communicating with target readers, because that risks losing the poetic essence of
the source work (1916/1991: 9)7.2.2.2 Task and project management
Experienced poetry translators also have sophisticated task-management strate-
gies. These enable translators to distribute effort across drafts, runs-through,
macro-sequences and micro-sequences, to alternate detailed work with quick
overviews, and to produce a series of versions that gradually develop a literal gloss
into an acceptable target-language poem. Such strategies are generally experience-
based (Mondahl and Jensen 1996: 100–101), implementing procedures which are
ready-made but which can be adapted to suit the specific challenges of specific
poems (allocating extra time in Draft 2 to tackling a previously-unnoticed reacti-
vated idiom, for example).
Poetry translators also strategically manage their role within the project and
the team. Deciding whether to enter a project depends on a metacognitive evalua-
tion of one’s own expertise: Carl’s “gut feeling ‘can I do it?’”. If the answer is “Yes,
but...”, then experienced translators plan how to compensate for their weaknesses- for example, by translating rhymed source poems into free verse. Interpersonally,
translators may recruit text helpers, or build contacts and cooperate with source
poets, commissioners, editors or publishers. If translators write paratexts, this