ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a description of the different elements habitually present in poetry. Poetry is defined as discourse with a clear expressive intention, recognisable as such by writer and reader. Most poetry translators focus on semantic equivalence, producing paraphrases of the ST. It is argued in this chapter that in order to produce a poem in its own right, the transfer of rhythm, connotations, inference and implicatures is vital. The pragmatic notion of relevance is used as a tool for analysing the degree of processing effort demanded by the reader in the ST and the TT. Examples are taken from translations of Emily Dickinson into Spanish, Portuguese and Swedish, and from recent translations of Galician poems from Galego (the language spoken and written in the region of Galicia, in north west Spain) into English. It is concluded that poets translating their own favourite poets, when purporting to transfer “the spirit“ of the ST, often make the TT difficult to process, due to the lack of pragmatic understanding, and a tendency to produce versions of the ST, and a mixture of word-for-word renderings and idiosyncratic interpretations.
