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Target
Vol. 14:1 (2002) ► pp.1–41

Evaluating translations of surrealist poetry

Adding Note-Down Protocols to Close Reading

| University of York
Evaluating translations of poetry will always be difficult. The paper focuses on the problems posed by French surrealist poetry, where the reader was held to be as important as the writer in creating interpretations, and argues that evaluations involving these poems inevitably require reader-response data. The paper explores empirically, in the context of André Breton’s “L’Union libre”, whether a modification of Think-Aloud procedure, called Note-Down, applied both to the original text and to three English translations, can contribute useful information to a traditional close reading approach. The results suggest that comparative Note-Down protocols permit simple cost-benefit analyses and allow one to track phenomena, like the persistence of an effect through the text, which might be hard to obtain by other methods.
Keywords: translation evaluation, poetry translation, Breton, readerresponse, Think-Aloud, Note-Down, Surrealism, hypothesis testing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Translating poems: General considerations
    • 2.1Why surrealist texts constitute a serious problem for translation
    • 2.2Evaluating a translation of a poem
    • 2.3Close reading and reader response
  • 3.Breton’s “L’Union libre”: Conclusions from close reading
    • 3.1The poem and its composition
    • 3.2The translations
    • 3.3A close reading of the poem and published critical analyses
      • 3.3.1Structure and support
        • Translation 1: Antin
        • Translation 2: Cauvin and Caws
        • Translation 3: Howard
      • 3.3.2The metaphoric images
        • Ln1Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois
        • Ln2Aux pensées d’éclairs de chaleur
        • Ln3A la taille de sablier
        • Ln4Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre
        • Ln5Ma femmeà la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d’étoiles de dernière grandeur
      • 3.3.3The global structure of the poem and its message(s)
      • 3.3.4The translations
        • Translation 1: Antin
        • Translation 2: Cauvin and Caws
        • Translation 3: Howard
  • 4.Eliciting readers’ responses
    • 4.1Creating a Note-Down design for “L’Union libre”
      • 4.1.1Design and method
      • 4.1.2Subjects
      • 4.1.3Validation
        • French group
        • English group
    • 4.2Results
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 January 2003
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.14.1.02low
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