Chapter 7. Conclusion
Secondly, poetry translators often have more team and project power than
translators in other genres. As a specialist in the source textual system, a poetry
translator may also act as a project’s editor or co-editor, or may advise an anthol-
ogy editor who does not read the source language. Poetry translators may decide
to translate a work simply because they like it, and then recruit a publisher them-
selves – whereas in other genres, the translator is usually recruited by other play-
ers, like the source writer, a literary agent or a publisher. Moreover, again unlike in
other genres, publishers’ deadlines are rarely a factor in poetry translating.
High working autonomy, of course, is not unique to poetry translators. This
also applies to medical interpreters, for instance, though for different reasons
(largely because they have to solve complex linguistic and interactional challenges
on their own and immediately). Conversely, a combination of situational factors
and wider power-structures means that translators in genres superficially similar
to poetry, such as literary prose, may have less working autonomy. Thus I, like
Flynn’s interviewees (2004: 378), have more than once found my literary-prose
translations published with extensive copy-editing changes made without my ap-
proval, whereas poetry editors have at most suggested occasional textual changes
to me before publication.7.3.3 Poetry translators as professionals
Several of the studies cited earlier regard working technical/commercial transla-
tors as ‘professionals’ (e.g. Fraser 2000; Jääskeläinen 1996; Tirkkonen-Condit
2002b). To continue Chapter 2’s discussion, should working poetry translators
therefore also be seen as professionals? Professionals were defined as practising an
occupation which requires special expertise and autonomous operation, often
with a sense of vocation. Later chapters have confirmed that poetry translators
score weakly on the occupation criterion, since they rarely make their living from
poetry translating alone, even though they do have special expertise and operate
autonomously. So does this mean that one feature distinguishing expert poetry
translators from expert translators in other genres is that poetry translators are less
professionalized?
Firstly, the vocation criterion implies that professional actions are socially
worthwhile and central to one’s identity. Few who are involved in poetry transla-
tion would dispute its social worth. On the identity sub-criterion, some of this
book’s poetry translators (Derek, for instance) seem to score strongly, whereas I
suspect that at least some of Glavinić’s native-English-writing co-translators in Scar
on the Stone might identify themselves as ‘poets who have also translated’ rather
than ‘poetry translators’. Regarding poetry translating as central to one’s identity,
therefore, might well depend to a great extent on how much time one spends on it,