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Lookup NU author(s): Emeritus Professor Francis Jones
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
After a short history of poetry translation, this article describes poetry’s key textual and extratextual features. The next section, Attitudes and approaches, looks at social attitudes towards poetry translation: the notion that poetry gets “lost in translation”, and the fact that poetry translators are highly visible. It then surveys overall approaches to poetry translation: literal cribs and interlinears; “re-creatively” conveying the source poem’s message in a target-language poem; adaptations/versions/imitations; poems inspired by other-language poems; and pseudo-translations. It also discusses debates within the re-creative approach: source versus target orientation; creativity; plus whether to convey source-poem fixed form – and if so, how. Finally, poetry-translation norms are mentioned. The following two sections describe translating processes, plus how translated poetry is brought to audiences and how it is read. Discussion then turns to translators’ skills, motivations and emotions, plus questions of loyalty and identity. The article subsequently addresses how poetry translators work with others: in a project team with people like an editor, a publisher and/or a source poet; and collaboratively, in a multi-translator grouping involving a source poet, one or more target-language poets, and/or one or more cross-language experts. There follows an overview of the social context that poetry translators and teams work in: the vocational “field” of poetry translators; remuneration, accreditation and training; and poetry translators’ social status. An overview of the publishing market for translated poetry follows, plus a discussion of how poetry translations have influenced target-language poetry, translation theory and the target language itself. After this, relationships between poetry translation and macro-social concepts such as culture or nation are explored. Finally, the article mentions areas of poetry translation worthy of future research, and relevant research methods.
Author(s): Jones FR
Publication type: Online Publication
Publication status: Published
Series Title: ENTI – Encyclopedia of Translation and Interpreting
Year: 2024
Access Year: 2024
Acceptance date: 03/08/2023
ISSN (electronic): 2951-6714
Publisher: Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación (AIETI)
Place Published: Granada
Access Date: 11 April
URL: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10949431
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10949431.
Notes: https://www.aieti.eu/enti/poetry_ENG/entry.html
