Magin_Edward-thesis

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his audience and their cognitive processing abilities and expectations. De Beaugrande
(1978:88) writes, “Only if the reading process is consistently pursued to the point where
the interpretation is maximally dominated by text-supplied information can a truly
objective translation be produced, that is, a translation which validly represents the
perceptual potential of the original” (author’s italics). Differences in reader-supplied
information may likely be the reason for the variation in translations of the same poem. It
may explain why “two translators seldom arrive at the same translation, and why literary
critics disagree so often” (De Beaugrande 1978:26).
2.2.2 Qualifications of a metapoet
According to Raffel (1991:88), the translator of poetry will ideally meet the
following prerequisites:
(1) The translator must have an extensive awareness of the poetic
tradition in the language into which he is translating.
(2) The translator should have a fairly considerable awareness of the
poetic tradition in the language from which he is translating.
(3) The translator must have high-order poetic skills in the language into
which he is translating: bluntly, the translator of poetry must himself be a
poet. (author’s italics)
However, Holmes (1988:11) asserts that the metapoet requires other specific skills and
that he or she does not necessarily need be a poet. He writes:
In order to create a verbal object of the metapoetic kind, one must perform
some (but not all) of the functions of a critic, some (but not all) of the
functions of a poet, and some functions not normally required of either a
poet or critic…Linking together these two activities, the critical and the
poetic, is an activity which is uniquely the metapoet’s: the activity of
organizing and resolving a confrontation between the norms and
conventions of one linguistic system, literary tradition, and poetic
sensibility, as embodied in the original poem as he has analysed it, and the
norms and conventions of another linguistic system, literary tradition, and
poetic sensibility to be drawn on for the metapoem he hopes to create.