Chapter 1. Introduction
with social and political forces to shape relations between communities who use
different languages – and even relationships within these communities.
But what about the argument against researching poetry translation – that it is
just one of many genres which give pleasure to readers or enable communication
between cultures, but also a minor, marginal genre in terms of numbers of words
translated? To understand all the processes mentioned above, we do need to study
a range of genres. This, however, is no reason to exclude poetry. Translation schol-
ars, say, are recently building up knowledge of expert and professional translators’
working processes in various genres (e.g. Jääskeläinen 2002; Göpferich 2005;
Buzelin 2006; Koskinen 2008). Adding the genre of poetry would expand knowl-
edge not only about poetry translating itself, but also about expert and profes-
sional translating in general.
But poetry may have a special contribution to make, which more than com-
pensates for its low translated word-count per annum compared to European Un-
ion legislation, say. Tymoczko argues that literary translation gives better evidence
than non-literary translation about interfaces between cultures because it happens
less “sporadically” and “locally”, and shows “greater cultural complexity and cul-
tural involvement”; moreover, the sophistication of literary language gives richer
material for analysing intercultural processes (1999: 30). Her arguments apply es-
pecially to poetry translation, with its multi-layered content and complex language- thus forming the basis for Chapter 3’s survey of how poetry translation sheds
light on inter-cultural relations, for example. They also highlight how research into
the translation of such complex, culturally involved texts can underpin the train-
ing not only of poetry translators, but also of translators tackling poetry-like fea-
tures in other genres, such as advertising or journalese.
1.2.2 The research picture
If poetry translating deserves academic study, how far has this need been met? There
are many published descriptions about how poetry translators translate and what
they produce. Most, however, are case studies into relatively few poets, translators or
translations – hence “views [...] are many and varied, often anecdotal and, perhaps
unavoidably, subjective” (D. Connolly 1998: 170). Nevertheless, they form a rich re-
source for examining poetry translators’ action, and so I briefly survey them below.
In translation research, a distinction may be made between ‘process’ and
‘product’. Process-based methods look more at translators’ activities, whereas
product-based methods focus more on text. Any model of translation, however,
needs input from both (Flynn 2004).
Beginning with process, many studies examine what poetry translators do.
Translators, for example, have often reported on how they translated poets and