Chapter 7. Conclusion
7.4.1 People and power
Several different variables interact to define a player’s power within a poetry trans-
lating team, as discussed in Chapter 3: team size, plus the player’s decision-making
authority, integration within the network, recruitment of other human and textual
actors, and external visibility. For instance, in the smallest teams (single-dead-
poet projects) the translator is typically the lead player, producing the text com-
plex with little input from others besides text helpers, whereas in the largest teams
(multi-poet projects) the lead player is typically an editor, who may be coordinat-
ing the work of several translators. A translator’s decision-making authority is of-
ten low in editor-led projects, but may increase if he or she takes on a co-editing
role. In integration terms, translator may be central to the network, peripheral to
it (like the supplier of the initial literals in Chapter 2), or absent from it (as in the
blog posting of a previously-published translation). A project’s initiators are also
its main recruiters, in that they assemble the core team and determine what it
produces. Translators may sometimes be project initiators. Even when recruited
by other players, however, a translator’s own recruiting power may vary between
relatively high and relatively low: generating literals for ten co-translators, for in-
stance, versus supplying one poem for an anthology. As for external visibility, this
is closely linked to the translator’s pre-existing capital.
Capital itself appears to be a secondary but potentially strong variable that af-
fects an actor’s likelihood of playing a high-power role within the team. High social
capital gained through working with editors and publishers on earlier projects, for
instance, might lead to a translator being asked not only to translate, but also to
help select poets and poems. Alternatively, high symbolic capital (prestige gained
from earlier translations or original writing) might increase a translator’s visibility,
so that she or he is named on an anthology’s cover, for instance. Here, the pub-
lisher might feel that this would help sell the work, and/or that it would enhance
the work’s symbolic “value” in the receptor culture (Casanova 2002/2010). High
capital might also give translators the confidence to approach publishers directly
with a translation book proposal, say, rather than thinking that they need a patron’s
recommendation or that they should pre-publish some of the poems in a journal.7.4.2 Team motives and identity
When forming a poetry-translating team, a project’s initiators are inspired by un-
derlying motives (to enable foreign readers to enjoy the works of a certain poet,
say) and practical objects (by publishing a collection of his or her poems in trans-
lation, say). However, there may also be deeper levels of motive. Teams often aim
implicitly or explicitly to promote their source poets as crucial international