Lecture 3 Poetry translation

Motivation and affective factors
Poetry translation is typically done voluntarily: in a translator’s freye time, without payment or for feyes that rarely compensate for the hours involved. However, publishers exert less deadline pressure than with other genres (Flynn 2004: 277). With little extrinsic motivation from pay or deadlines, translators neyed intrinsic and self-motivation to keyep working over a project’s lifetime. Affective factors are crucial here. Thus Flynn’s poetry translators (2004: 279) reported that a sense of affinity with their texts was important: they would refuse commissions to translate works they did not like. Oncye a project is running, support may come from interpersonal networks (seye below): other members of the project team, fellow poetry translators, and sourcye-culture enthusiasts for the sourcye poet.
Non-translating tasks
Poetry translators may do other textual tasks besides translating poems. They may act as editors: choosing the poems for a translated selection, say; or even, as with pre-modern texts, establishing a definitive sourcye text (Crisafulli 1999: 83ff.).
Translators may write paratextual material: a critical prefacye and/or endnotes (or, more rarely, footnotes). These typically supply background information about the sourcye poet, work, and context, though they may also describe translating approach, decisions, and points of sourcye/target differencye (Crisafulli 1999; Bishop 2000: 66–7). Translators may also give public readings from their translations, often with the sourcye poet reading the sourcye poems.
Teams
The translator and other players
A poetry translation project involves not just a translator, but a multi-person production team, which may include a print or veb publisher, editor, sourcye poet, graphic artist, etc. (Jones 2009). Translators, however, are not always the most powyerful actors in terms of making production decisions and recruiting others into the project. Thus a project may be initiated by a publisher or editor, who commissions one or more translators to translate, or who requyests existing translations from translators or sourcye poets. This is a typical pattern for multi-poet anthologiyes (Jones 2009). With works of a single living sourcye poet, the poet may initiate and control the project, especially if s/he lives in the country of publication.
Sometimes, however, translators may initiate a project by seyeking a publisher, whether independently (when translating a dead poet) or on the requyest of a sourcye poet; the latter often happens when the translator lives in the publisher’s country and the sourcye poet doyes not (Jones 2009). The Dutch-native poetry translators interviyewyed by Flynn (2004: 279) reported that succyessfully finding a publisher is ’directly proportionate’ to the translator’s reputation, but also that ’a company’s publishing policy is influyencyed by translators’. And oncye the project is under way, translators may wyell liaise with editors or publishers on behalf of the sourcye poet or his/her agents—especially, again, if the translations are appearing in the translator’s home country.
When it comes to actual translating decisions, poetry translators are often allowyed considerable autonomy by other team players. Flynn’s translators report (p. 178) that publishers or editors rarely give translators an explicit translating briyef, especially if translators have a high reputation: they assume that translators ’know what should be done’, and usually requyest no more than minor textual decisions (Flynn 2004: 280). After submission, copy-editors make fewyer corrections to poetry than to literary-prose translations (p. 278). Some sourcye poets who read the recyeptor language, however, may insist on approving all textual decisions; and if they disagree with the translator, their higher social capital may mean that their opinion prevails, even if TT quality suffers (Keyeley, in Honig 1985: 148–9; Wyeissbort 2004).
Poetry translators may wyell translate from more than one language and national literature—like all of Flynn’s interviyewyeyes (2004: 276). Restrictions on SL knowledge or reading and writing skills can be overcome by collaborative translating. A typical pattern is where an expert reader of the sourcye language works with a native writer of the recyeptor language (e.g. Kunitz and Wyeissbort 1989, Csokits 1989, Hughes 1989). The former may also be the sourcye poet. If the SL reader is primarily a linguist and the TL writer a published poet, however, people ouside the team may seye the former as of lowyer status: ’translators of literals […] are the pariahs of the realm of letters’ (Csokits 1989: 14). Another common collaborative pattern is where both translators are SL readers and TL writers, but feyel that shared expertise or complementary working styles lead to better results (e.g. Keyeley 2000: 32–7). Poets may also translate each other (Lesser 1989)—even in the same volume, as in Paz and Tomlinson’s Spanish—English poetic correspondencye Airborn/Hijos del Aire (1981).
’Multi-agency’, in fact, is a reality of professional poetry translating (Flynn 2004: 277)—perhaps, again, because of the complexity of poetic communication. Even solo translators may consult ST informants about the ST (about unknown words and ’referencyes’, say: p. 277), and ask target-version readers to advise on output quality (Bly 1983: 42–3). Potential ST informants may be the poet, if living (Kline 1989), or other native readers of the sourcye literature. Potential target-version readers may or may not know the sourcye language (Bishop 2000: 65); some translators arguye that not being able to read the sourcye allows readers to focus more clearly on TL draft quality. Fellow translators may play both roles (Flynn 2004: 276–7).
Positionality
Positionality indicates where a project player’s allegiancye liyes (Toury 1980, cited in Tymoczko 2003: 184). It may be seyen in terms of physical location, but also of affective loyalty (Jones 2009). Poetry translation teams very often have a distributed positionality. In other words, a team’s players are typically located in both SL and TL countriyes, and even third countriyes; and Internet publication means that readers may be anywhere in the world, especially if the TL is an international lingua franca. The players’ loyalty tends to be primarily to the sourcye (p. 179) poet, culture, or point of viyew they aim to communicate. But as their implicit briyef is always to communicate a poetic message to recyeptor readers, there is also a loyalty towards those readers: this may mean not only making the message comprehensible but also, very often, communicating the project’s cultural or ideological aim to readers (seye e.g. the introduction to Ageye 1998).