Regarding Symbolic Capital: Poetry Translators from Modern Greek into English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v0i58.111676Keywords:
symbolic capital; poetry translation; Modern Greek; empirical; paratextsAbstract
The research object of this study is the symbolic capital of poetry translators and how it shapes and is being shaped by the current practices and self-descriptions of translators of Modern Greek poetry into English. A number of case studies indicate that people who translate poetry come from a variety of backgrounds, including those of a poet and an academic, which often do not include any formal translation training (Hofstadter 1997; Waldinger 2003; Bullock 2011; Isaxanli 2014). It also appears to be common that translators of poetry have a number of complementary roles, with that of ‘poetry translator’ not always central. The study draws on data consisting of Modern Greek into English poetry translators’ responses to a survey, of paratexts created by Modern Greek into English translators and of ten interviews. Cultural and educational capitals are examined in their institutionalized, objectified and embodied form as bearers of symbolic capital. Three overlapping categories are explored: the translators’ connection to poetry and the source culture, translator education and translator self-description. The translators’ “extratextual visibility” (Koskinen 2000 as cited in Chesterman 2018: 446) is also analyzed as it forms part of the translators’ embodied cultural and symbolic capital. This empirical exploration offers insights into the variety of attitudes and approaches to poetry translation; the emerging patterns map out profiles of a group of contemporary poetry translators, investigate the realities of the craft and re-position poetry translation practitioners with respect to other translation professionals.
References
Assinder, Semele 2012: ‘To say the same thing in different words’: Politics and Poetics in Late Victorian Translation from Modern Greek. In Journal of International Women’s Studies, 13(6): 72-84.
Barnstone, Alice 2006: The collected poems of C. P. Cavafy: a new translation. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Beaugrande, de Robert 1978: Factors in a theory of poetic translating. Assen: Van Gorcum & Co.
Berengarten, Richard/Nikolaou, Paschalis 2013: Under Greek Light [online]. http://interlitq.org/issue21/paschalis-nikolaou/job1.php (Accessed 15 October 2017).
Bergin, Tara 2013: Ted Hughes and the literal: a study of the relationship between Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky and his poetic intentions for Crow. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Blakesley, Jacob 2014: Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Blakesley, Jacob 2016: Examining Modern European Poet-Translators ‘Distantly’. In Translation and Literature 25, 10-27.
Blakesley, Jacob 2018: Sociologies of Poetry Translation: Emerging Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1990: The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1993: The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1997: The forms of capital. In Halsey, A. H./Lauder, Hugh/Brown Philip/Wells Stuart, Amy (eds.), Education: Culture, Economy and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 46-58.
Bullock, Philip Ross 2011: Untranslated and Untranslatable? Pushkin’s poetry in English, 1892-1931. In Translation and Literature, 20, 348-372.
Chesterman, Andrew 2009: The name and nature of Translator Studies. In Hermes 42, 13-22.
Chesterman, Andrew 2018: Translation ethics. In D’hulst, Lieven/Gambier, Yves (eds.), A History of Modern Translation Knowledge. Sources, concepts, effects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 443-448.
Constantine, David 2011: Service abroad: Hölderlin, Poet-Translator. In Translation and Literature 20, 79-97.
Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam 1985: Translating poetic discourse: Questions on Feminist strategies in Adrienne Rich. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Dimoula, Kiki 2012: The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected poems. Margellos World Republic of Letters: Yale University Press.
Felstiner, John 1980: Translating Neruda: The way to Macchu Picchu. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Flynn, Peter 2005: A linguistic ethnography of literary translation: Irish poems and Dutch-speaking translators. Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent, Belgium.
Flynn, Peter 2013: How Eurocentric is Europe? Examining scholars’ and translators’ contributions to translation studies – an ethnographic perspective. In Van Doorslaer, Luc/Flynn, Peter (eds.), Eurocentrism in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 43-59.
Gass, William H. 1999: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the problems of translation. Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press.
Genette, Gerard 1997: Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gouadec, Daniel 2010: Translation as a profession. Amsterdam/Phladephia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Gouanvic, Jean Marc 2005: A Bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence of practical instances. In The Translator 11, 142-166.
Gouanvic, Jean Marc 2014: Is Habitus as conceived by Pierre Bourdieu Soluble in Translation Studies? In Vorderobermeier, Gisella M. (ed.), Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/New York: Brill, Rodopi, 29-42.
Hadas, Rachel 1994: Other words than this: translations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hadas, Rachel 2015: Talking to the dead. New York: Spuyten Duyvil.
Harsent, David 2012: In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos. London: Enitharmon Press.
Heino, Anu 2017: Contemporary Finnish Literary Translators and Symbolic Capital. In Keng, Nicole/Nuopponen, Anita/Rellstab, Daniel (eds.), Ääniä, Röster, Voices, Stimmen. VAKKI-symposiumi XXXVII 9.-10.2.2017. VAKKI Publications 8. Vaasa, 52-63.
Hofstadter, Douglas 1997: Le ton beau de Marot: In praise of the music of language. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Isaxanli, Hamlet 2014: History and Policy of Translating Poetry: Azerbaijan and its neighbors. In Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 59, 310-329.
Jacobs, Adrianna X. 2014: The Go-Betweens: Leah Goldberg, Yehuda Amichai, and the Figure of the Poet-translator. In Bermann, Sandra/Porter, Catherine (eds.), A Companion to Translation Studies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Ltd, 479-491.
Jones, Francis 2009: Embassy networks: Translating post-war Bosnian poetry into English. In Milton John/Bandia Paul, Agents of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 301-325.
Jones, Francis 2011: Poetry translating as expert action. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Jong de, Engelien 1999: The impact of motivation on the career commitment of Dutch literary translators. In Poetics, 26, 423-437.
Karyotakis, Kostas 2006: Battered Guitars: Poems and Prose. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press.
Keeley, Edmund 1977: Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress. London: The Hogarth Press.
Keeley, Edmund 2000: On translation: Reflections and Conversations. Reading: Harwoord academic publishers.
Kenesei, Andrea 2010: Poetry translation through reception and cognition: the proof of translation is in the reading. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Mackridge, Peter 2010: Kay Cicellis: the unresolved dilemma of the bilingual writer. In Wills, David (ed.), Greece and Britain since 1945. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Meylaerts, Reine 2010: Habitus and Self-description of Native Literary Authors-Translators in Diglossic Societies. In Translation and Interpreting Studies, 1-19.
Meylaerts, Reine 2013: The multiple lives of translators. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 26, 103-128.
Munday, Jeremy 2014: Using primary sources to produce a microhistory of translation and translators: Theoretical and methodological concerns. In The Translator 20, 64-80.
Munday, Jeremy 2016: Jon Silkin as anthologist, editor and translator. In Translation and Literature, 25, 84-107.
Ober, Kenneth, H./Ober, Warren U. 2004: Puŝkin and Southey: Russia’s greatest poet translates England’s poet Laureate. In Russian Literature LV, 529-547.
Refsum, Christian 2017: When poets translate poetry: authorship, ownership and translatorship. In Alvstad, Cecilia/Greenall, Annjo, K./Jansen, Hanne/Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina (eds.), Textual and contextual voices of translation. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 101-118.
Ruokonen, Mina 2016: Realistic but not pessimistic: Finnish translation students’ perceptions of translator status. In The Journal of Specialised Translation 25, 188-212.
Sapiro, Gisele 2013: Translation and identity: Social trajectories of the translators of Hebrew Literature in French. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 26, 59-82.
Scott, Clive 2012: Translating the Perception of Text. London: Legenda.
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet 2008: The translator’s personae: marketing translatorial images as pursuit of capital. In META LIII 3, 609-622.
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet 2014: Translators’ Identity Work: Introducing Micro-Sociological Theory of Identity to the discussion of translators’ habitus. In Vorderobermeier, Gisella M. (ed.) Remapping habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi/Brill, 43-55.
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet 2016: Elite and non-elite translator manpower: The non-professionalized culture in the translation field in Israel. In JoSTrans 25, 54-73.
Simeoni, Daniel 1998: The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus. In Target, 10, 1–39.
Skeggs, Beverley 2015: Capital, value and theories of social power. In Holborn, Martin (ed.), Contemporary Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 16-31.
Swartz, David 1997: Culture and Power: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tall, Emily 1990: Correspondence between three Slavic translators of Ulysses: Maciej Slomczynski, Aloys Skoumal and Viktor Khinkis. In Slavic Review 49, 625-633.
Trypanis, Costantine 1971: The Penguin Book of Greek Verse. London: Penguin Books.
Vardoulakis, Dimitris 2001: An interview with Edmund Keeley. In Colloquy, 5, Monash Arts, [online]. http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts-files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_five_/vardoulakis.pdf (Accessed 12 October 2017).
Voinova, Tanya/Shlesinger, Miriam 2013: Translators talk about themselves, their work and their profession: the habitus of translators of Russian literature into Hebrew. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 26, 29-57.
Vorderobermeier, Gisella 2014: The (Re-)Construction of Habitus: A survey-based account of literary translators’ trajectories put into methodological perspective. In Vorderobermeier, Gisella M. (ed.), Remapping habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi/Brill, 149-161.
Waldinger, Albert 2003: Stopping by the woods: Classic American poems in Yiddish. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 16, 155-174.
Wang, John C. 1965: Ezra Pound as a Translator of Classical Chinese Poetry. In The Sewanee Review, 73(3), 345-357.
Weissbort, Daniel 1989: Translating Poetry: The double labyrinth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weissbort, Daniel/ Eysteinsson, Ástráður 2006: Translation : Theory and practice : A historical reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, Michaela 2013: “Prompt, at any time of the day…”: the emerging translatorial habitus in the late Habsburg monarchy. In Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal 58(3), 504-521.
Wright, Chantal 2016: Literary Translation. New York: Routledge.
Barnstone, Alice 2006: The collected poems of C. P. Cavafy: a new translation. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Beaugrande, de Robert 1978: Factors in a theory of poetic translating. Assen: Van Gorcum & Co.
Berengarten, Richard/Nikolaou, Paschalis 2013: Under Greek Light [online]. http://interlitq.org/issue21/paschalis-nikolaou/job1.php (Accessed 15 October 2017).
Bergin, Tara 2013: Ted Hughes and the literal: a study of the relationship between Ted Hughes’s translations of János Pilinszky and his poetic intentions for Crow. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.
Blakesley, Jacob 2014: Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Blakesley, Jacob 2016: Examining Modern European Poet-Translators ‘Distantly’. In Translation and Literature 25, 10-27.
Blakesley, Jacob 2018: Sociologies of Poetry Translation: Emerging Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1990: The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1993: The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1997: The forms of capital. In Halsey, A. H./Lauder, Hugh/Brown Philip/Wells Stuart, Amy (eds.), Education: Culture, Economy and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 46-58.
Bullock, Philip Ross 2011: Untranslated and Untranslatable? Pushkin’s poetry in English, 1892-1931. In Translation and Literature, 20, 348-372.
Chesterman, Andrew 2009: The name and nature of Translator Studies. In Hermes 42, 13-22.
Chesterman, Andrew 2018: Translation ethics. In D’hulst, Lieven/Gambier, Yves (eds.), A History of Modern Translation Knowledge. Sources, concepts, effects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 443-448.
Constantine, David 2011: Service abroad: Hölderlin, Poet-Translator. In Translation and Literature 20, 79-97.
Diaz-Diocaretz, Myriam 1985: Translating poetic discourse: Questions on Feminist strategies in Adrienne Rich. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Dimoula, Kiki 2012: The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected poems. Margellos World Republic of Letters: Yale University Press.
Felstiner, John 1980: Translating Neruda: The way to Macchu Picchu. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.
Flynn, Peter 2005: A linguistic ethnography of literary translation: Irish poems and Dutch-speaking translators. Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent, Belgium.
Flynn, Peter 2013: How Eurocentric is Europe? Examining scholars’ and translators’ contributions to translation studies – an ethnographic perspective. In Van Doorslaer, Luc/Flynn, Peter (eds.), Eurocentrism in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 43-59.
Gass, William H. 1999: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the problems of translation. Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press.
Genette, Gerard 1997: Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gouadec, Daniel 2010: Translation as a profession. Amsterdam/Phladephia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Gouanvic, Jean Marc 2005: A Bourdieusian theory of translation, or the coincidence of practical instances. In The Translator 11, 142-166.
Gouanvic, Jean Marc 2014: Is Habitus as conceived by Pierre Bourdieu Soluble in Translation Studies? In Vorderobermeier, Gisella M. (ed.), Remapping Habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/New York: Brill, Rodopi, 29-42.
Hadas, Rachel 1994: Other words than this: translations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Hadas, Rachel 2015: Talking to the dead. New York: Spuyten Duyvil.
Harsent, David 2012: In Secret: Versions of Yannis Ritsos. London: Enitharmon Press.
Heino, Anu 2017: Contemporary Finnish Literary Translators and Symbolic Capital. In Keng, Nicole/Nuopponen, Anita/Rellstab, Daniel (eds.), Ääniä, Röster, Voices, Stimmen. VAKKI-symposiumi XXXVII 9.-10.2.2017. VAKKI Publications 8. Vaasa, 52-63.
Hofstadter, Douglas 1997: Le ton beau de Marot: In praise of the music of language. New York: Hachette Book Group.
Isaxanli, Hamlet 2014: History and Policy of Translating Poetry: Azerbaijan and its neighbors. In Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal, 59, 310-329.
Jacobs, Adrianna X. 2014: The Go-Betweens: Leah Goldberg, Yehuda Amichai, and the Figure of the Poet-translator. In Bermann, Sandra/Porter, Catherine (eds.), A Companion to Translation Studies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Ltd, 479-491.
Jones, Francis 2009: Embassy networks: Translating post-war Bosnian poetry into English. In Milton John/Bandia Paul, Agents of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 301-325.
Jones, Francis 2011: Poetry translating as expert action. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Jong de, Engelien 1999: The impact of motivation on the career commitment of Dutch literary translators. In Poetics, 26, 423-437.
Karyotakis, Kostas 2006: Battered Guitars: Poems and Prose. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press.
Keeley, Edmund 1977: Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress. London: The Hogarth Press.
Keeley, Edmund 2000: On translation: Reflections and Conversations. Reading: Harwoord academic publishers.
Kenesei, Andrea 2010: Poetry translation through reception and cognition: the proof of translation is in the reading. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Mackridge, Peter 2010: Kay Cicellis: the unresolved dilemma of the bilingual writer. In Wills, David (ed.), Greece and Britain since 1945. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Meylaerts, Reine 2010: Habitus and Self-description of Native Literary Authors-Translators in Diglossic Societies. In Translation and Interpreting Studies, 1-19.
Meylaerts, Reine 2013: The multiple lives of translators. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 26, 103-128.
Munday, Jeremy 2014: Using primary sources to produce a microhistory of translation and translators: Theoretical and methodological concerns. In The Translator 20, 64-80.
Munday, Jeremy 2016: Jon Silkin as anthologist, editor and translator. In Translation and Literature, 25, 84-107.
Ober, Kenneth, H./Ober, Warren U. 2004: Puŝkin and Southey: Russia’s greatest poet translates England’s poet Laureate. In Russian Literature LV, 529-547.
Refsum, Christian 2017: When poets translate poetry: authorship, ownership and translatorship. In Alvstad, Cecilia/Greenall, Annjo, K./Jansen, Hanne/Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina (eds.), Textual and contextual voices of translation. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 101-118.
Ruokonen, Mina 2016: Realistic but not pessimistic: Finnish translation students’ perceptions of translator status. In The Journal of Specialised Translation 25, 188-212.
Sapiro, Gisele 2013: Translation and identity: Social trajectories of the translators of Hebrew Literature in French. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, redaction 26, 59-82.
Scott, Clive 2012: Translating the Perception of Text. London: Legenda.
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet 2008: The translator’s personae: marketing translatorial images as pursuit of capital. In META LIII 3, 609-622.
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet 2014: Translators’ Identity Work: Introducing Micro-Sociological Theory of Identity to the discussion of translators’ habitus. In Vorderobermeier, Gisella M. (ed.) Remapping habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi/Brill, 43-55.
Sela-Sheffy, Rakefet 2016: Elite and non-elite translator manpower: The non-professionalized culture in the translation field in Israel. In JoSTrans 25, 54-73.
Simeoni, Daniel 1998: The pivotal status of the translator’s habitus. In Target, 10, 1–39.
Skeggs, Beverley 2015: Capital, value and theories of social power. In Holborn, Martin (ed.), Contemporary Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 16-31.
Swartz, David 1997: Culture and Power: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tall, Emily 1990: Correspondence between three Slavic translators of Ulysses: Maciej Slomczynski, Aloys Skoumal and Viktor Khinkis. In Slavic Review 49, 625-633.
Trypanis, Costantine 1971: The Penguin Book of Greek Verse. London: Penguin Books.
Vardoulakis, Dimitris 2001: An interview with Edmund Keeley. In Colloquy, 5, Monash Arts, [online]. http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts-files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_five_/vardoulakis.pdf (Accessed 12 October 2017).
Voinova, Tanya/Shlesinger, Miriam 2013: Translators talk about themselves, their work and their profession: the habitus of translators of Russian literature into Hebrew. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 26, 29-57.
Vorderobermeier, Gisella 2014: The (Re-)Construction of Habitus: A survey-based account of literary translators’ trajectories put into methodological perspective. In Vorderobermeier, Gisella M. (ed.), Remapping habitus in Translation Studies. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi/Brill, 149-161.
Waldinger, Albert 2003: Stopping by the woods: Classic American poems in Yiddish. In TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 16, 155-174.
Wang, John C. 1965: Ezra Pound as a Translator of Classical Chinese Poetry. In The Sewanee Review, 73(3), 345-357.
Weissbort, Daniel 1989: Translating Poetry: The double labyrinth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weissbort, Daniel/ Eysteinsson, Ástráður 2006: Translation : Theory and practice : A historical reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, Michaela 2013: “Prompt, at any time of the day…”: the emerging translatorial habitus in the late Habsburg monarchy. In Meta: Journal des traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal 58(3), 504-521.
Wright, Chantal 2016: Literary Translation. New York: Routledge.
Downloads
Published
2018-12-22
How to Cite
Georgiou, N. (2018). Regarding Symbolic Capital: Poetry Translators from Modern Greek into English. HERMES - Journal of Language and Communication in Business, (58), 99–115. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v0i58.111676
Issue
Section
THEMATIC SECTION
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
