Poetry Translating as Expert Action
7.3.2 Poetry translators as translators
How far are the poetry translator’s cognition, emotion, action and relation shared
with translators of other genres, and how far might they be specific to poetry?
To begin with, how poetry translators view their communicative role has
much in common with other genres. Firstly, virtually all translators and interpret-
ers aim to relay the most relevant aspects of a source text in a form that is fit for use
by their audience. When judging what might be relevant, translators and inter-
preters in many genres face potential conflicts between recreating semantics and
other aspects of meaning. For example, a community interpreter’s ethic of acting
as a client’s “honest spokesperson” may often involve a tension between “exact and
faithful reproduction [...] of the original discourse” and enabling “successful com-
munication” (Pöchhacker and Kadric 1999; Pöchhacker 2001: 413, citing Harris,
R. Jones and Gile). Moreover, for translators in all literary genres, producing ‘fit for
use’ target texts almost always also requires similar stylistic and intrinsic-form
skills as a published receptor-language writer – as in Yan Fu’s observation that lit-
erary translation requires not only ‘faithfulness’ and ‘comprehensibility’, but also
‘elegance’ of language (1901/2004: 69)^2.
Poetry translators, therefore, resemble other translators in that they see them-
selves as mediators of communication between those who do not share a language.
This implies that any cognitive differences between translating poems and finan-
cial reports, say, stem largely from the different cognitive challenges posed by their
genre-specific features: the need to pay attention to word-sound versus termino-
logical accuracy respectively, say.
For reasons such as these, many of the working processes used by poetry
translators resemble those reported for other genres. Thus prose translators also
translate literally until this proves unfit for purpose: what Tirkkonen-Condit calls
“the literal translation automaton” (2005: 407–411). And prose translating, like
poetry translating, is also non-linear, iterative and multi-tasked (Shih 2006; Ségui-
not 1996, 2000; Breedveld 2002; Dancette and Ménard 1996; Lörscher 1996; Fraser
1996; Tirkkonen-Condit 2002a). Thus, with poetry as with other genres, compre-
hension merges into production; cross-language transfer and revision are two as-
pects of the same (re)writing process; problems are put on hold while related prob-
lems are solved; attention alternates between global and local, sense and form; and
structures of target-text meaning derive not only from the source text, but also
from the emerging target text itself.
This book’s translators are also expert translators, who have much in common
with expert translators in other genres. Experts were defined in Chapter 1 as- 信 xìn, 達 dá, 雅 yǎ.