Review of Herbert, Jones & Sampson (2025): Collaborative Poetry Translation: Processes, Priorities, and Relationships in the Poettrio Method

The poetry of Jidi Majia celebrates the traditions of the Yi minority in China, especially the Nuosu tribe, or Black Yi. His works have attracted global recognition, thanks to their translation into over 40 languages, including English, Spanish, Irish, Greek and Scots. In 2019, a Portuguese version of Jidi’s poetry was produced by José Luís Peixoto, as part of a project jointly promoted by the National Press and Publication Administration of China and corresponding Portuguese cultural agencies. Given the relative scarcity of literary translators who are proficient in Mandarin and well-versed in the culture of Chinese ethnic minorities, the translation of Jidi Majia’s poetry into other languages usually relies on “indirect translation”, often using English as an “intermediate language.” For his Portuguese renditions, Peixoto used English, French, and Spanish as intermediate languages and solicited the collaboration of a Portuguese-speaking Chinese scholar, Cláudia You, to check his translations. The published version of Jidi Majia’s poetry in Portuguese is, therefore, the result of multiple layers of interpretation, rewriting, cross-checking and redrafting. As with all examples of indirect and collaborative translation, the process raises questions about responsibility and the relative authority of the contributing actors and intermediate texts. This article explores these questions, drawing not only on the Chinese source text, the English intermediate text and the Portuguese target text, but also on paratexts, including the introduction to the Portuguese edition, the email correspondence between José Luís Peixoto and Cláudia You, Cláudia You’s notes on Peixoto’s draft translations, and an interview with her about her experience as a collaborator. From this case study, the author of the present paper seeks to identify the boundaries and roles that must be negotiated in cases of collaborative and indirect translation, particularly when the outcome is to represent an ethnic minority for a cosmopolitan readership.

In 1952, Jean Lescure, a French poet, offered to translate the poems of Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti into French. A search of the Jean Lescure archives revealed that for the poems in the La Terra Promessa collection (1950), Ungaretti had prepared what he called “translation attempts” or “translation with literal indications of meaning” in French. This chapter discusses a case of poetry translation based on a self-translation, whose process was closely followed by the author, from the first draft to final editing. Looking specifically at the manuscripts of one poem in this collection, “Canzone”, this study analyses a creation process that began with a literal translation by the author, seeking interventions in both poets’ manuscripts to unveil the mechanisms involved in this four-handed poetry translation. The poets’ correspondence is also studied, illustrating the creative process through the cross-references of the poet–translator and the poet. An understanding of how this process fits into a collaborative translation perspective was also sought: what are the freedoms and limitations of a poet–translator who is guided by a poet–author? What issues emerge from a self-translation that is then re-created or rewritten in the translator’s own language?

Collaborative translation does not occur very often, though in the case of poetry we more frequently come across such works. The highly complex character of poetry translation and the daunting task of transferring formal qualities of rhythm, rhyme, assonances, and other sonic properties along with conveying ambiguities and nuances, multilayered meanings, and metaphoric images, necessitate a combination of abilities and cross-cultural competencies that are rarely found in a single person – justifying collaborative translation, preferably to be carried out by experts from both the source and target cultures. Yet, this approach poses its own unique challenges and obstacles. Based on a case study of translation of three volumes of poetry from Persian and Arabic into English, the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of intercultural collaborative translation will be discussed. 1

A Dialogue between Chinese and American Poets in the New Century: Their Poetry Reading, Translation and Writing in Collaboration

Collaborative Poetry Translation

This article examines the collaborative verse translations undertaken by the learned amateurs Nicholas Bacon and John Hobart in their 1664–65 correspondence. The letters reveal the pair’s critical attitudes as translators, and also include their substantial discussion about secondary textual and antiquarian resources. This article argues that Hobart and Bacon have three distinct methods of dealing with difficult passages of their texts – conjecture, the collation of different editions and commentaries, and the use of antiquarian resources – which each enables them to think critically about a given crux whilst avoiding the finality of a definitive resolution. In these three methods, the pair invoke humanist antecedents as well as distinctively modern seventeenth-century resources such as reference books. In the latter case, the men also provide a notable case study in the practical use of a particular type of early modern book which is usually difficult to trace in the historical record.

The Kopilka Project: Collaborative Translation of Russian Anti-war Poetry

Girish Karnad is not only India's leading playwright, and a practitioner across the performing arts in all that nation's media, but the first contemporary Indian writer to have achieved a major production in a regional American theatre – Naga-Mandala, seen at the Guthrie Theatre in July 1993. The following interview was recorded on the occasion of that production, and ranges widely not only over Karnad's own work and its circumstances, but the situation and problems of the Indian theatre today, and its ambivalent relationship alike to its classical and its colonial past, and to the contemporary problems of its society. The interviewer, Aparna Dharwadker, is Assistant Professor of Drama and Eighteenth-Century British Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her essays and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Modern Drama, and The Sourcebook of Post-Colonial English Literatures and Cultural Theory (Greenwood, 1995). She has also published collaborative translations of modern Hindi poetry in major anthologies, including The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994), and is currently completing a book-length study of the politics of comic and historical forms in late seventeenth-century drama.