Poetry Translating as Expert Action
workshops or modules can also feature in creative writing courses. This book’s
findings can have input into both training modes. The finding that co-translating
is extremely common in poetry, for example, recently inspired me to set up an
exercise for trainee translators in which each person had to translate a poem into
their mother tongue from a language they did not know, using help from a source-
language-reading classmate. Alternatively, the finding that translators justify cre-
ative transformations in terms of underlying image has provided an invaluable
rule of thumb in workshops exploring poetry translation with experienced crea-
tive writers.
Finally, I hope that at least some poetry translators, be they novices, experts,
or both, will browse or read this book, and find some echo of their own experi-
ences in it or – most welcome of all – debate and even dispute some of its claims
with me. In the end, this book is for and about these poem players: those who play
with poems, those who play out others’ poems. In their playing, they share with
others their pleasure in this art – an art that goes deeper into language and life
than any other.