Discussion of analyzed data

The aim of this chapter is to present a discussion of the research question, which is ‘How does the translatorial habitus affect the reading-for-translation process of Modern Greek into English poetry translators?’ The key concepts of habitus and reading-for-translation have been explored both theoretically and with respect to the specific group of poetry translators whose data are used for this study. The discussion presented here is based on findings from the data gathered and analyzed in the previous Chapters 5, 6 and 7.

8.1 Overview of findings

This study investigates what the translator as reader brings into the translating process, with an emphasis on the pre-translation decisions poetry translators make in the initial or orientation phase. Thus the enquiry is primarily translator-centered and not text-based, which means that the particular properties of the texts are not the main focus here; at the core of this study stands the translator and their individual and shared characteristics which construct their professional identity, what has been termed their translatorial habitus. At the same time, the focus lies also in the translatorial decisions that emerge from the dynamic interaction between translator and text.

The data gathered has provided evidence that the translatorial habitus of Modern Greek into English poetry translators involved in this study affected their reading-for-translation process in several ways. Firstly, the participants’ demonstrable expertise regarding the genre of poetry and their intimate knowledge of the literary fields of both the source culture and the receptor culture were evidenced by the speed and ease with which the reading-for-translation task was performed. This familiarity with the genre and knowledge of the literary field is a key component of the translatorial habitus of the translators who participated in this study. The implications are wide and varied as has been discussed in chapter 7 and is also discussed in section 8.2. The aspects of the translatorial habitus evidenced here are the institutionalized disposition (reflected in the highly institutionalized educational credentials most translators have) with its accompanying implications of high cultural and social capital, which is often legitimated into recognized symbolic capital. The institutionalized habitus also reveals that translators frequently have a less experimental attitude towards the selection of material and the translating process, which demonstrates the power of the habitus over what is chosen to be read in the source language. A pre-selection process takes place on that level, as several translators responded they read in order to find poems to translate (see Figure 6.11).

Second, an important aspect of the translatorial habitus is reflected in the participants’ self-confidence in handling the source text, which was demonstrated by their locating potential difficulties during the reading-for-translation task and knowing where to find the information they needed in order to recreate the poem in English. Handling issues such as titles of the poems with relative ease is an indicator of the

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automaticity of some of the processes which are set in motion when a solution to a translation problem is required. This high degree of automaticity is in itself both another sign of the translatorial habitus and further evidence of how the expertise of the translators affected the reading-for-translation process. Finally, the participants’ translatorial habitus is structured by the overlapping fields to which they belong, which results in the norms of these fields being internalized by the translators. Although ‘drawer time’ and speaking to a native receptor language speaker are not part of the initial orientation phase of the translation process, the decision to involve text-helpers and/or to leave the translated version aside for a period of time are unwritten norms of the translation field, which have become internalized principles for the translators and they may be said to affect the reading-for-translation process. What follows is a more detailed discussion of the findings presented in this overview.

8.2 Discussion of collected data

Existing models of the translator as reader, based on the situated theories of individual translator- scholars, have listed several skills and attributes that the poetry translator brings along into the translation process. The collected data from the poetry translators who participated in this study corroborate to a great degree the findings of these situated theories.

Regarding the translatorial habitus and its effect on the reading-for-translation process, for the Modern Greek into English poetry translators of this study, a combination of data from the survey and the interviews demonstrate the translators’ confidence regarding the source text, its selection and subsequent translation. This confidence seems to be a key attribute which constitutes the basis of the translators’ expertise and characterizes their translatorial behaviour during the orientation phase of the translation process. This confidence is closely connected to the translators’ self-image, as evidenced firstly by their self-descriptions in the survey. In it eleven respondents identified as ‘A poet who also translates’ and six respondents selected ‘A scholar who also translates (note that multiple responses were possible).

This self-description, apart from positioning the translators within their professional field(s) of choice, also records the translators’ approach to the source text and the principles that guide their decision- making when they choose and translate it. The perspective selected is clear: in most cases, the poet and the scholar come before the translator. This choice underpins the ideological presuppositions of the translators and foregrounds their stance with respect to the source text, the target text and the translation process.

Data from both the survey and the interviews regarding the input of other translation agents (the poet, text-helpers) in the translation process also displays self-confidence as a key characteristic. The survey questions about contacting the poet, contacting text-helpers, which matters they are consulted and to

what degree their input is accepted manifest this strong sense of authorship. This sense of agency is also retrievable in the translators’ paratexts, in which the multiple voices of the translators who have translated a single poet are presented within a single-poet volume. What is presented there is not the English version of a Greek poet but the different voices the poet has been given into English by their multiple translators.

The translators’ responses to the interviews as well testify to this effect, as the translators showed unwillingness to translate what they perceived as ‘bad poetry’. The distinction between poeticity and literariness, discussed in Chapter 3 and 7, with regard to translators’ decision to translate is also clearly connected to their confidence and sense of self-worth. The terms were defined in Chapter 3 (Hoffstaedter 1987). Poeticity refers to “the linguistic and textual features associated with poetry” (1987: 116-7) whereas literariness “may involve […] the evaluation of the literary value of the text” (1987: 117). What is manifested in these occasions is the translators’ degree of agency and the responsibility they assume towards the text and towards their peers, as translating poetry is a socially situated activity firmly ensconced within the translation field the translators belong to.

This agency and sense of authorship necessarily has an effect on the overall translation process: the translator’s voice and choices are the principal guide which is shaped by the capitals and illusio inherited and negotiated by the translator as they are part of the translation field. It is within that field that the mental schema is consequently co-constructed. This mental schema is the actual source text constructed by the translator during the reading-for-translation. The choice of which text is selected for translation may be seen as a further direct effect of the translators’ illusio and their educational capital on the reading-for-translation process.

The sense of confidence and self-worth is also connected to the familiarity with the poet’s work and/or oeuvre, which affords the translator with more ease and transforms the translation process into a familiar, and pleasant, task. This sign of expertise is particularly important for the construction of the mental schema during the orientation phase, as has been noted in a study by Afflerbach (1990). As discussed in Chapter 2, a characteristic of expert readers with high prior knowledge who read a text within their domain knowledge is that they may already ‘know’ the information in the text prior to the reading task (1990: 40). When this occurs, readers likely use an initial hypothesis strategy in order to confirm or amend an already existing mental schema of the text to be translated.

Still regarding the poet and the translators’ scholarly attention to the poet’s oeuvre, three poetry translators in this study (P1, P4 and P7) said they would read more to familiarize themselves with the poet’s work before translating an unfamiliar source text. Situating the poet within a literary tradition may be seen as an attempt of the translator to complement and expand their already existing prior domain, genre and author knowledge (already a constituent of their translatorial habitus) in order to offer a more substantial reading-for-translation. This investment in the game of translating poetry forms

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a significant part of the translators’ illusio and necessarily guides their choices of what and how to translate.

As was noted in Chapter 7, the importance of pre-reading decisions cannot be underestimated as a great number of reader expectations, and therefore reader strategies, regarding the text at hand are activated exactly at that phase before any actual contact with the text has been made. At this stage it is the background knowledge the reader brings into the reading process that predetermines to an extent how the text at hand is to be read. As was discussed in Chapter 2, this background knowledge, the collected skills and resources the reader draws upon in order to decipher the text, have been amassed over time and are the result of previous reading experience, education and indoctrination by institutions and the family; in other words, these skills and resources form the readers’ educational and cultural capitals, which in turn shape their habitus. As a consequence, in the case of the Modern Greek into English poetry translators who participated in this study, it is safe to assume that it is their educational and cultural capitals which guided, at least initially, the strategies they adopted in order to read the text for translation.

Chronologically, it was announced to the participants that they would be asked to read a poem and then discuss it with the researcher. This was a premeditated choice as the point was to ask the participants to perform a task that they would consider as routine, that is, something they have willingly and successfully performed several times in the past. The genre was therefore fixed, and the strategies employed set in motion by the announcement of the type of text by the researcher at the early stage of explaining the project to the participants and inviting them to participate in it. The participants’ acceptance/refusal ratio (20 Yes–8 No) may be some initial evidence of the poetry translator’s habitus, which has been traced in previous chapters to be more akin to that of a literary habitus. That is, several of the translators who participated described themselves as primarily scholars or poets and secondarily as (poetry) translators.

With respect to the ten translators who participated in the verbal reports and interviews, there was little hesitation about how to navigate the text they were presented with. The combination of the announcement by the researcher that the texts to be read are poems, the typographic arrangement of words and spaces on the page and the author’s name did not raise any doubts in the participants’ minds regarding the poeticity of the text, as was discussed in Chapter 7. What was questioned by some participants was the literary merit of what they viewed as poems. This ease and familiarity with the genre and the knowledge of the most preferable strategies in order to read the text demonstrate that the participants utilized this resource to their benefit.

The familiarity with the genre does form part of the participants’ translatorial habitus; some pre-set principles regarding contemporary poetry and its translation may also be seen as traces of the translatorial habitus affecting the reading-for translation process, as in the following excerpt:

P7: most contemporary Greek poets really just think of poetry as something that needs to be broken into lines but that’s you know not nearly enough so you tend to there’s a tendency shall I put it this way if I have to translate such a poem there’s a tendency on my part which probably isn’t exactly what I should be doing to over-determine it to somehow try to improve the line endings and make them more decided in the way they’re placed in translation than how they are in the original (5349-5354)

But even before this actual reading of the text, the readerly expectations and strategies of the translators were activated by the poet’s name, the title of the poem or the publication date which they could see on the page, as was discussed in Chapter 7. Statements like the following demonstrate how the participants oriented themselves with regard to the text using semantic markers as cues which were then matched with information drawn directly from the resources which make up their cultural capital.

P4: I really believe that before I start translating the poem by Ganas or by Katerina I have to have read to be to already know their work before to have read their work to know what they’re trying to do with their work in order to be able to translate it right (3935-7)

P7: I cannot place her [Iliopoulou] in terms of a tradition she could be a modern poet most likely she is a modern poet rather than someone from the generation of the 70s (5302-3) P8: well Ganas I know who he is and I presume he’s still alive so and I know that Theodorakis has set him to music so I’m familiar with his poetry and his style a little (5957-9)

These stock responses, as Richards would call them, which mask automated processes, are probably the most valid indicator of the presence of the translatorial habitus.

In addition, what was observed, with regard to how the translatorial habitus affected the reading-for- translation process of the translators who participated in this study, was the effect of the internalized norms permeating the field of cultural production where the translators belong. In the case of the Modern-Greek-into-English poetry translators, the field is to be found in the overlapping space of Modern Greek Studies, Literary Studies and Translation Studies. The data showed evidence of how relevant Translation theories, for instance, permeate the translators’ discourses during the verbal protocols and the interviews and how they frequently guide their translation process.

The practice of ‘drawer time’ (Jones 2011: 91), for instance, is repeated by at least four of the participants.

P0: but then obviously it’s wise to put it aside for quite a long time (412)

P2: for a gestational period I mean I make something I put it away in a drawer I leave it to proof as they say about dough I take it out I kneed it again I put it away again (2966-2968)

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P5: It depends [00:00:04 pause] I would say you know about a week for a decent first draft and then I put it on a shelf and I go back to it later and so the tinkering process can last indefinitely (5074-5076)

P7: more often than not if I leave something in a drawer or in my on file in my computer for a little while every time I see I check the poem and the translation again I make slight improvements here and there (5450-5452)

While some participants stated that they have translated and published poems under strict deadlines, the tendency seems to be towards a slower process which allows the translator to take some time and distance themselves from the translated text. This principle follows the unwritten rule in the field that dictates that one’s texts become better if the writer is given the time to edit and polish them.

Speaking to a native English speaker or to people with literary skills seems to be another of the unwritten rules that permeate the field and are reflected in some of the participants’ accounts.

P7: when I translate into English I very rarely have I sent a translation to a publisher or a journal editor without a native English speaker also checking the text for anything between basic linguistic mistakes language mistakes (5421-5423)

P8: peers fellow poets fellow translators are I never as a rule hand in do anything a translation or a poem to a magazine or anything without having ran it by a few people whose ear I trust in English to tell me whether this is working (6276-8)

This section has discussed the analyzed data that were presented in the previous chapters 5, 6 and 7 with the aim to explore the research question concerning the how the translatorial habitus affects the reading-for-translation process. In the following section a model for the poetry translator as reader has been put together using the information from translation scholars, currently active translations and the data gathered in this study.

8.3 The model of the poetry translator-as-reader

The model of the translator-as-reader presented here is the amalgamated attempt at theory generation based on a combination of poetry translators’ situated theories and empirical data from my own study. It should be noted, as it was explained in Chapter 2, that the categories adopted from Diaz-Diocaretz (1985) and Beaugrande (1978) have been produced as a result of their own practice as poetry translators; in the case of Jones the categories have been borrowed from Linguistics and tested with Jones’s empirical research with poetry translators and himself (Jones 2011).

The model includes seven main categories, six of which were borrowed from the three previously mentioned scholars (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985, Beaugrande 1978, Jones 2011). The final category is proposed by me and consists one of the contributions to the expansion of this model with more up-to-

date information. It is termed knowledge of the translation field and is the product of the empirical data gathered and the study of individual translators’ accounts.

The sub-categories which define and explicate the main categories have been produced either by 1. one of the three previously mentioned scholars (Diaz-Diocaretz 1985, Beaugrande 1978, Jones

2011) (appearing in blue) or

2. they have been suggested by the accounts of individual poetry translators (Weissbort 1989, Scott 2012, 2015) (appearing in yellow) or

3. they have been suggested by other TS scholars working with literary translators (Sela-Sheffy 2008, Meylaerts 2010) (appearing in green).

4. Finally, a few sub-categories have been extracted from the empirical data which were produced by the Modern Greek into English poetry translators who participated in this study (appearing in purple).

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Figure 8.1 Category of Author knowledge and sub-categories

Familiarity with the author’s work and the literary tradition they come from or belong to plays an