Poetry Translating as Expert Action
but also on the relationship between poetry translating and other potential voca-
tions (like that of receptor-language poet) within one’s schema of selfhood.
This in turn implies that some poetry translators are more professionalized
than others. Professionalization, however, involves not just individual identity, but
also group identity. This book’s translators showed different degrees of integration
into relevant groups (i.e. second-order networks or fields), implying different de-
grees of professionalization. Some were interlinked as acquaintances across sev-
eral projects (like Bruce and Carl), or strongly integrated into wider webs of liter-
ary production involving source poets, editors and publishers (like Wayles Browne
or Amela Simić). And with interpersonal connections comes collegiality (recom-
mending a less experienced fellow-translator to a publisher, for instance), respect
for demarcation lines (‘I wouldn’t translate poet X, because colleague Y translates
her’), and shared norms. Other translators, by contrast, are less integrated into
these networks, and thus more peripheral to the relevant poetry-translator field.
On other criteria for professional status, such as the use of training and quali-
fications to gatekeep entry to the profession, poetry translation scores weakly. On
this and the earning-one’s-living criterion, however, poetry translators are not the
only literary-production actors to score weakly: one does not need an editorial
diploma to edit a poetry anthology, for instance, and few poets earn a living from
poetry. In this respect, Taylor argues that occupations, as socially beneficial activi-
ties, should be classified along two independent axes: unpaid ↔ paid and
formal/ public ↔ informal/ private (2004: 38–39, after Glucksmann). Poetry trans-
lating and poetry writing, though unpaid, are ‘formal/ public’: that is, they are
regulated within a social field, where different players’ social, cultural and sym-
bolic capital, and hence labour-market relations, operate no less strongly than in
paid professions such as teaching (ibid.: 44).
Should experienced, strongly networked poetry translators then be called
‘professionals’? One option is to expand the notion of ‘professional’ to include un-
paid as well as paid formal/ public work. However, the term ‘vocation’ already has
this coverage, describing a socially regulated activity of high social worth, where
high-expertise players can gain cultural and symbolic capital, but not necessarily
high pay. Using this term would also mean rescuing ‘vocational’ from its pejora-
tive sense of ‘non-academic’ (as in ‘vocational education’), and reviving its positive
sense of describing the values and practices that underpin a true vocation.7. 4 Project and team
The section examines the project team as a context for poetry translating action,
focusing on issues of personal power, team motives and team identities.