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analyzed in the first instance by applying inductive labels which were mined from the interview and verbal protocol data. These inductive codes were afterwards merged together into themes which were extracted from the conceptual and theoretical frameworks discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. This process of analysis was chosen in tune with the main purpose of this study which is to merge, complement and expand on the current translator-as-reader models proposed by Jones (2011) and Diaz- Diocaretz (1985) which are discussed in detail in Chapter 2. The coded data and the coding framework are available in Appendices F and G.

Chapter 7 continues the exploration of the two basic concepts proposed for examination in the research question (namely, how the translator habitus affects the reading-for-translation process) by presenting and discussing the findings of the interviews with ten translators and the verbal reports produced by five translators. The chapter is divided in two sections: firstly, the interview data is presented and discussed followed by a section on the verbal report data. A discussion of the combined data from chapters 5, 6 and 7 follows in the overall discussion of Chapter 8.

7.1 Analysis of data regarding habitus and types of capital

The interview data aim at exploring the concept of translatorial habitus and in particular the translatorial habitus of the participants to this study, the translators of poetry from Modern Greek into English. The questions asked of the participants were designed primarily to serve that purpose. Some of the questions asked are presented in the following table (the Interview questions are discussed in more detail in Chapter 4:

How did you become interested in Modern Greek poetry?

What was it that urged you to study literature and learn modern languages? As a rule, do you choose the poets you translate?

When does the actual translation process begin for you? How long do you usually need in order to translate a poem? Do you ask the poet for advice/comments?

Do you discuss the source poem or you own version with others?

Table 7.1 Sample questions from interviews with poetry translators

Issues of motivation and investment, the translators’ illusio, agency and the translators’ process, among others, were discussed in the interviews. Illusio includes the reasons why the participants decided to translated poetry, why they learned Modern Greek, how they entered the field of translation and why they are still part of it. This is a significant but rather subtle indicator of the internalization of culture by the translator; illusio is the product of the activation of several types of cultural, social and

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educational capital and is demonstrably linked to individual but also communal habitus. Some of the studies mentioned in Chapter 3 identify the outcomes of this conflux of capitals which takes the form of

1. “personal interest in promoting a genre” (Gouanvic 2005: ),

2. “a desire to visit the [source] country” (Voinova and Shlesinger 2013:),

3. a “close familiarity to source culture by reading about it” (Voinova and Shlesinger 2013:) and even

4. “translating a piece of work without having a commission for it or a specific outcome in mind” (Gouanvic 2014: 34).

7.1.1 Types of capital

When queried about their initial discovery of Modern Greek as a language and culture and Modern Greek poetry in particular, some of the participants responded in a way that often merged the two, i.e. the poetry and the language it is translated from did not seem as two separate spheres of activity or interest but one:

P0: I became interested in some Modern Greek poetry and I spent enough time in Greece to feel an interest in modern literature (13-15)

P5: I have a background in classical philology but really my passion is Modern Greek (4800- 1)

P8: it began with songs the soundtracks were so wonderful of Theodorakis you know when I was first interested in Greece and didn’t know the language I knew the music so the soundtracks were my introduction I mean I think the first things I read in Greek script were Ritsos’s poems you know the soundtrack to Epitaphios because I wanted to understand what the music was and what words had to do with one another (6299-6303).

For some of the participants the route to Modern Greek was more circuitous and involved the study of Latin first:

P3: I started actually with Latin translating Latin […] it was for a graduate course […] that ended up being fairly successful and it ended up getting published and I thought oh maybe I’m you know maybe I’m good at this (3558, 3563-4)

P5: I went to middle school […] I had to select a language and I chose Latin and I really loved translating Latin it was my favorite thing (4948-4953)

The above comments illustrate the degree of prior-knowledge and pre-existing internalized influences that have, in the form of cultural and educational capital, shaped the translatorial habitus of the poetry

translators. Firstly, traces of the educational capital are apparent in the participants’ comments about their familial environment and the role it played in their further intellectual development:

P5: I always loved language and I mean a had an interest in Greek mythology and ancient architecture ancient Rome when I was a child (4947-8)

P8: I’d been brought up on a lot of poetry by my mother who taught English (6296-7) P9: My parents loved great literature and read it to their kids (6398)

Voinova and Shlesinger also recognize this “exposure to literature/art as children” (2013: …) as an n important aspect of the literary translator’s professional habitus. This aspect is further explored in Chapter 8 with the additional information provided by the questionnaire data.

The accumulation of the appropriate educational capital which influenced the translators’ illusio with regard to their motivation to read and translated Modern Greek poetry becomes manifest in the participants’ comments about the role of their teachers:

P5: my high school teacher […] had lived in she had lived in Greece […] and she brought in Elytis I don’t remember who did the first Elytis translations but we all we had to read The Axion

Esti like every year […] at the beginning of class [laughs] so it was just always to me it was

part of my poetry education with Seferis and Elytis and Cavafy (4969-4976)

P9: [I was lucky] to have James H. Oliver (already an accomplished and well published translator) as a Greek teacher (6372-3)

Motivation to translate is equally connected to the type of cultural capital that arises from the enjoyment in the study of literature:

P5: I just love poetry I’ve always loved poetry I [00:00:04 pause] in I went to an Arts high school (4966-7)

P6: The magic of the words, the mystery of their combinations [urged me to study literature and learn modern languages] (5199)

P8: when I think about the sort of poets that I have sitting on my desk it’s so often Greeks it’s so often Cavafy and Kavvadias who’s a great love of mine and also Szymborska you know I don’t speak Polish but I love her poetry so […] I certainly I certainly thrive [laughs] thrive on great voices and I like to have them around me I always have a shelf of really wonderful poets I admire of course Shakespeare as well or the Bible you know this great English poetic tradition (6173-6181)

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The enthusiastic language used to describe the participants’ love of poetry should be noted in the above statements. This deep pleasure derived from literature, the study of which denotes the acquisition of a significant institutionalized, embodied and objectified educational capital, also necessarily leads towards the proliferation of the translators’ cultural capital. The objectified aspect is manifest in the comment of P8 who lists the books sitting on their desks, i.e., the actual books being the objects which demonstrate the existence of multiple types of capital by their mere presence.

The literature read and enjoyed in the case of these translators is not confined to one language but, through the added capital provided by the acquisition of other languages, covers at least two cultures: what becomes the source and receptor cultures for the translator. This knowledge of the source literature (Modern Greek literature) is demonstrated in the following comments:

P0: So I think English language Seferis sounds maybe too Anglophone when his deepest inspiration is still French really (256-7)

P2: I love Ganas from a relatively young age (2247)

P5: that’s where in the Odyssey they get blown off course and it’s like a very windy place [P5 refers to the promontory Tainaro] (4704-5)

P7: I did like his poetry [Vayenas’s] especially because it has a sort of a it has a tone and a sense of irony and a sort of a sense of it is measured it is not over-emotional it takes things from Cavafy things from Sikelianos but there is a kind of balance that appeals to me let me put it this way it’s not too lyrical let’s say (5787-5790)

P8: I think Ganas is a poet that interests me I like his work (6105)

On this score, the knowledge of the translators with respect to Modern Greek literature but also English literature is a significant source which informs their translating process (as will be discussed in 7.2). 7.1.2 Knowledge of the translation field

This intimate knowledge of the literary works and history of more than one culture is very similar to the work of a literary critic. There are occasions in which the translators demonstrated the ability to examine a poet’s work macroscopically and discover patterns of similarities and points of connection: P0: I think Cavafy loved Browning’s poems and he stole an awful lot from him in a clever way. (172-3)

P4: we also have the other thing when we say April because it says here April in poetry April in English poetry is T. S. Eliot (4091-3)

P6: The freedom, the linguistic arbitrariness, the ground-breaking and innovative un- grammaticalness of the American poet [Emily Dickinson] helped me to reject many linguistic

inhibitions and to avoid using wooden academic language, like the ones that so often paralyse whoever writes or translates into a non-native language, however well they know it (5265-8) P7: the poems have are more influenced by say Anglo-Saxon modernism which is one of Vayenas’s major influences through Seferis as well (5591-2)

Interestingly, however, this intimate knowledge of and dedication to poetry is not merely the trait of a philologist who happens to read in more than one languages. The cultural capital amassed by the participants further extends to an interest in monitoring the production of translated Modern Greek poetry into English. The word ‘monitoring’ is specifically chosen as a number of the participants demonstrate great familiarity with what is published in the field but also with how what is published is received by both critics and reviewers and sometimes the Anglophone readers. This attitude reflects Sela-Sheffy’s classification (2008) of the roles of literary translators as guardians of domestic culture/language, as importers and innovators and as artists in their own right.

P0: there are some old-fashioned translations of Palamas by Stephanides (125-6)

P0: there it’s a very interesting project in effect it’s a sort of David Harsent book on themes of Ritsos in the sense that he doesn’t keep the titles the same for the most part (703-5)

P0: So a lot of Ritsos appeared in magazines and then his poems were quite widely read and distributed in the general world sort of communist setting actually (714-5)

P3: I thought that Olga Broumas’s ones are quite good [translations of Dimoula’s poems] (3465)

P8: Philip Sherrard he produced the first volume of what was a multi-volume set of the complete works of Papadiamantis (6135-6)

This purveyance of the field of translated Modern Greek poetry is also manifest in the translators’ knowledge of the work of their peers, present and past:

P0: Stephanides was quite an ingenious translator (128)

P1: Alicia [Stallings] has a wonderful essay about this you could find it probably on Jstor she was asked by the Yale Review maybe five or six years ago to review Daniel Mendelson’s Cavafy and she turned it into a very graceful essay on why so many Cavafy translations (1672- 4)

P3: I felt like the existing translation is quite good and people kept telling me it was not the Stephanidou↗ which is done in rhyming couplets and everyone was like oh it’s old it’s fussy and I would read and I was like look I’m wrestling with this right now [Erotokritos] and I think that he’s doing a very good job at solving these problems (3551-4)

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P5: I would go to the Keeley and Sherrard translations and it didn’t feel like my own authentic experience of working with the poems (4804-6)

P7: some of the translations were really good some of the translations were not so good but with historical value some of the names were important like Kimon Friar for instance or John Stathatos John Stathatos whose some of his translations we used but not the ones from

Biography (5647-5650)

With respect to the issue of peers Voinova and Shlesinger (2013) noted two characteristics which are echoed to some degree in this study: the translators acknowledged the traditions they had inherited from their predecessors and had two approaches to colleagues who were active at the same time: either an overall negative attitude with stress on negativity and the attempt to retain (symbolic) capital or they demonstrated a spirit of collegial support. There are examples of the first case, as was unearthed during the exploration of archival material, among the translators who were active until the late 1990s (discussed in Chapter 5). What has been recorded in this study is more a spirit of collegiality.

Collegiality is also manifest in the social network the translators participate in. The participants, through their interrelations with their consultants and text-helpers, activate the social capital acquired at various stages of their professional lives. As discussed in Chapter 6, the final questions of the survey conducted demonstrated that several of the participants frequently activate this amassed social capital in the form of networks of people who are willing to help, offer advice or free intellectual labor during the translation process. This is a significant finding for the purposes of this study, as if foregrounds the collaborative and non-solitary aspect of the poetic translation process.

P6: I discuss with many people and each time I do, especially with people who have very little to do with the field (like, for instance, with my very bright trainer) I gain much (5291-2) 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)

P8: I belong to a group of translators of poetry from other languages six of us we’ve worked together for ten years we’d meet once a month and we were all working on different languages and we would try out our translations on each other to see how they worked in English and that was very useful too (6256-9)

P9: I have friends in Greece who are interested in literature. I sometimes ask them questions on specific lines of poetry by email. I journeyed in Greece while translating Ritsos, and sought out such friends in both Athens and Thessaloniki to help with elusive verses. They were not always helpful (6417-6420)

Advice and comments are not always useful or even welcome, however, as P9 has noted above. P7 ultimately states in terms of the accountability of the translator with respect to their work that:

your name is the one that’s attached to the translation it’s your responsibility the final decisions rest with you (5538-9).

Unsurprisingly, the poet of the source text may quite often be an important consultant. What is far more interesting, however, is the degree to which the translator follows the poet’s advice and suggestions. This seems to be negotiable, as the interviews testify. This is an intriguing finding as it adds further nuance to the translation process, as is discussed in section 7.2

P0: it clearly is more challenging if the person is dead like Solomos there’s nothing they can do to you if it’s a living poet they might depending on their personality or their beliefs wish to exercise some control (575-8)

P6: [I contact the poet] To answer a question or to confirm something. But experience tells me that often there’s good reason for my doubts and that lack of clarity, ambivalence, ambiguity are probably faults of the poem itself. (5295-7)

P7: I never hesitate to contact a poet […]I’m fairly confident of being able to filter information so if they give me advice about ten things I know what I can fairly quickly understand what’s you know sift through this material and these thoughts and know what I need (5541-5544) Two important issues are highlighted here by the translators: the dynamics between poet and translator over issues of authority, in its dual meaning: firstly, there is the issue of the control over the text and its possible interpretations. Second, there is the issue of who the author of the target text actually is. This is an interesting topic, as flaws with the translated text often tend to be attributed to the translator, whereas a successful translation is often presented as the work of a brilliant source author.

This very intriguing relation between authorship and ‘translatorship’ (Jansen and Wegener 2017) necessarily reflects the translators’ sense of self-worth and may be seen as a consequence of their varied and nuanced self-descriptions, presented in Table 6.11 in Chapter 6. This assertive attitude towards the source poet, particularly viewed in combination with the confidence towards handling the target text, proves a significant point with regard the translation process.

The necessary filtering of information received is another issue highlighted here by the translators. This aspect of the degree of influence of the poet was also evident in the corresponding responses to the survey, discussed in Chapter 6.

P6 in the above comment mentions another significant issue, touched upon by scholars exploring the empirical approaches to literature, and discussed by a number of translators elsewhere: that of the poeticity of a text versus its literariness. The terms were defined in Chapter 3 (Hoffstaedter 1987).

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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). This evaluation is evident in the translators’ comments regarding how they choose the poetry they translate.

P0: on the whole I prefer not to spend my time reading bad poetry let alone talking about it So and therefore that would lead me to think that doing a translation might be if it works then it might be worth it (362-4)

P0: I would only translate something I thought was good (623-4) P6: I have been very fortunate and I can choose who to translate (5212)

P8: I just don’t like translating stuff I don’t like much and having just done a novel I really disliked the end of it I just thought gosh I don’t have enough years left to waste my time on something I don’t really care for (6089-6091)

P9: if I don't much like a poem, I don't translate it (6395)

Such statements on freedom of choice of the material to translate is a concrete example of an instantiation of the translators’ agency; professional autonomy, defined by Ruokonen (2016) as ‘[the] power to turn down unsatisfactory commissions and to control their [the translators’] work conditions’ (Ruokonen 2016: 190), may also be perceived as a marker of high status, which is in turn connected to symbolic capital that several participants derive from their roles within academia.

In the following section, data pertaining to the translation process with an emphasis on the reading-for- translation phase will be presented. The data is retrieved from both the interviews and the verbal protocols but is presented in the following section as it explores the basic research question this study set out to discuss: how does the translator habitus affect the reading-for-translation process?