Dr. Jeneen Naji is the Digital Media Program Coordinator in the Department of Media Studies, in the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Jeneen is the convener of NUIM’s Digital Arts Research Cluster and a committee member of the Irish Symposium on Game Based Learning. She is both a practitioner and theorist of digital poetry with an undergraduate B.A. hons in writing and theatre and postgraduate M.Sc. in multimedia.  jeneen.naji@nuim.ie

The field of electronic literature and its sub set digital poetry is increasingly recognized, along with a simultaneous and corresponding prevalence of digital technologies and online content creation, as entering into mainstream consciousness. As a result the question as to whether a digital poem can really be considered a poem or even literature is no longer considered seriously. Instead our efforts are steered more usefully towards charting the changing shape of the poem in a contemporary digital age. However this does not mean that we disregard previous literary models of criticism, we can only truly chart where we are if we can trace a path from where we have been. The continued recognition of the usefulness of traditional analogue models is necessary in order to revise them appropriately for emerging contemporary digital artifacts. This is what this paper seeks to do by examining the process of translation of a poem from analogue to digital by using Holmes’ poetry translation theory as a filter to examine the transposition process. Concurrently evidence from interviews conducted with the creators of digital poems is also examined.

1.         Translation as Communication McLuhan purports that the modern reader is involved in total translation of sight into sounds as she looks at the page; in this case McLuhan is referring to a reader translating from print into oral words in the mind. So this too can be equally applied to the translation of poems from print into online visuals in the electronic media. This then is translation as communication and it is in this manner that I refer to translation, in a similar sense to Hatim and Mason. They look upon translation “as an act of communication which attempts to relay, across cultural and linguistic boundaries, another act of communication (which may have been intended for different purposes and different readers/hearers)” (Hatim and Mason, 1). The digital poet through the digital poem is communicating to the creader[1]; perhaps the intended communication differs from that actually received but that point is outside the research question of this paper.

This paper instead focuses on the process of creation of the digital poem, the translation of the poem from paper to pixel. Stephanie Strickland a theorist and digital poet lists translation as one of the eleven characteristics of digital poetry, or as she refers to it, networked digital poetry. According to Strickland, digital poems engage translation in many ways if we view digital media as “a language without any native speakers, an all border crossing language” into which poems have been translated. This is a characteristic that is of particular interest to this paper and one that is strongly evident in the digital poems. In the sense that they are indeed translations but that rather than poetry being translated from one spoken language to another we can see them being translated from print into digital which behaves as a language.

Sondheim also cites translation with reference to digital poetry, however he notes it in relation to code, in the “narrower sense that code refers to a translation from natural language to an artificial, strictly defined one; the syntax of Morse code, for example has no room for anomalies or fuzziness” (Sondheim). Similarly Fedorova tells us that electronic literature deals with two languages, natural language and code, and that in both cases translation is involved.

Whilst translation with reference to code and codework[2] in digital poetry is a rich and complex area it is not that aspect with which this paper is concerned. Instead the digital poetry on which this paper focuses starts out as written or print poetry; the poem’s initial form has been analogue on printed-paper. To look at what happens next, the process of translation of the static text into visual motion graphics with audio and interactivity, is essential to understanding what digital poetry is. It is comparable to the creation of music videos in that in music videos, music comes first, so too in digital poetry does the poem come first (Vernallis, x). There is however one exception and that is generative digital poems, in these instances the computer code generates the poem, each experience is unique based on a series of variables at each instance of play. The code will however use variables such as words to generate a poem so in a sense a generative digital poem still exists in print first but not to the same extent as in other examples where a definite written poem exists which is then translated into a digital version. As such this paper does not deal with generative digital poetry and instead focuses on digital poems that existed as print poems first in order to conduct a comparative analysis of the changing form of the poetic artifact.

In this sense similarities can be found in the process of translating a poem from one language to another and the process of translating a poem from print to digital. In order to identify these similarities and/or differences, I will apply poetry translation theory to the process of digital poetry creation using digital poet interview responses as evidence. I will explicate Holmes’s theory with reference to other models and examples from both traditional print poetry translation and digital poetry translation. This is in order to further elucidate the appropriateness of Holmes as a model for the analysis of the process of translation of a print poem to a digital poem and also to highlight the importance of translation in relation to digital poetry. The aforementioned will help to identify the specificities of the digital poem and their impact on poetic expression.

James S. Holmes, a poet and a translator of poetry provided what is widely considered the most systematically theoretical map of processes involved in poetic translation. I will use Holmes’ map with reference to other relevant translators and theorists as a conceptual core for attempting to extend the understanding of such translation into the realms of digital poetry. As Fedorova suggests, “the translation of a computational system to produce linguistic or narrative creativity would involve a very deep analysis and understanding of the system”. The use of translation theory to examine the changing form of the poem in an increasingly digital age does not account for the myriad of complex discourses and players found within. Nonetheless it does offer value in terms of acting as a prism with which to conduct a comparative analysis in order to examine and unlock the creation of specific digital poetry examples, towards the goal of a greater understanding of the poetic affordances of the digital medium.

We can apply Holmes’ model of translation to digital poetry translation if we interpret language A, the source text, to be a piece in standard textual language and language B, the target text, to be the piece translated into digital multimedia form. The transfer mechanism is then both the digital poet and the software applications of choice (such as Adobe Flash[3]) with or without the collaboration of the poet. In this case the translator first decodes the piece to allow for assimilation and interpretation and then recodes the piece into a new mode. Whether this new mode is from one language to another such as for example French to Spanish or analogue to digital it does not affect the model.

2.         The digital poet as Translator In order to begin to examine the process of translation it is first necessary to identify who is steering the process of translation. What is immediately clear from the results of the interviews overall is that in each case the digital media technologist was the primary, often sole, translator, despite, in most cases, there being in existence a separate person (the poet) who was the original author of the poem in its written form.

Initially I had anticipated a more traditional and less complex translation relationship such as that outlined by O’Hagan and Ashworth who state, “even if the whole communications environment is transformed, the basic and unchanging role of the Translator will be to facilitate communication between the Sender and the Receiver of the message” (O’Hagan and Ashworth, 150). Through this before I conducted interviews I had understood that the original poet was the Sender, the creader the Receiver, and the digital technologist or the digital poet the translator. However while it is clear that the digital poet is the translator, they are also the Sender, as the involvement of the original poet in the creation of the digital poem was minimal. They tended to defer to the greater technology skills of the digital poet and therefore a great amount of the digital poet’s interpretation of the poem was transmitted therefore the digital poet is also the Sender. Evidence of this is apparent in answers such as that from Robinson who, when asked about the working arrangements with the original poet, states, she “didn’t actually add much to the development of the final piece aside from very limited periodic feedback. At the time I was panicked about our lack of communication and close collaboration”. Also Ong tells us “we kept the process simple. The poet sent me the poem…Then I sent her a mock-up, kind of a sketch…After receiving positive feedback, I proceeded in completing the building and programming”.

Others such as SamuelChristopher when making their digital poem “Hunger” (Collins and SamuelChristopher) did not consult the poet Billy Collins as is evidenced by Sam Tootal’s answer, “It is entirely our interpretation of the poem”. This lack of communication between the traditional poet and digital poet undermines virtually all ‘co-piloting’ regarding intertextuality and lead me to focus specifically on the decisions the digital poets made. O’Hagan and Ashworth (58) suggest the term transterpreting as a new mode of translation, though they use it to refer to multilingual languages in a text-based chat environment. It is however relevant to this research in the sense that it affords the translator the ability to interpret themselves, in digital poetry this is particularly apparent because of the expanded potential mutability of meaning in poetry. Due to this the scope for the digital poet’s interpretation of a poem differing from that of the original poet remains vast.

While collaboration does exist in the creation of the digital poetry examples I examined it seems to be mostly between members of the translator or digital poetry team and not between the poet and translator. Sam Tootal tells, “We [Sam Tootal and Christopher Turner] work very closely on all projects – whether it be in the same room or on opposite sides of London. Firstly we bounce ideas back and forth, so we usually spend at least half a day discussing the creative/narrative approach to a project and then begin to create elements that inform the next stage of the process and that might change the outcome of the final piece as we discover things along the way”.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is another creative partnership that I interviewed regarding their digital poem “The Last Day of Betty Nkomo” (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries). It is made up of Marc Voge and Young-Hae Chang and they both wrote the text, “we wrote it for International AIDS day some years back” (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries) and made the digital poem. In the case of Dylan Sheehan he also wrote the poem and made the digital poem (Sheehan).

3.         Holmes’ Forms of Translation James Holmes (29-30) argues that the relationship between the translator’s (in this case the digital poet) chosen form of metapoem and the total effect that it produces is extremely close. The translator has chosen a different form for the metapoem whose original basis is the same work, and these differences in forms all evoke very different tones. Each of these translators at the start of the translation process made very specific choices, which affected the outcome of the final piece (Holmes, 29-30).

Holmes’ (26-27) outlines the following four approaches that translators have traditionally come upon as solutions to the problem of form of the metapoem. Firstly there is a mimetic form where the original form is kept (most similar to original). This approach tends to have the effect of re-emphasizing, “by its strangeness, the strangeness which for the target-language reader is inherent in the semantic message of the original poem” (Holmes, 27). Then there is the analogical form; here the translation seeks functionally to parallel the form in the original’s poetic tradition. Both of these are “form derivative…determined as they are by the principle of seeking some kind of equivalence in the target language for the outward form of the original poem” (Holmes, 26). There is also the organic form or “content derivative”, this form starts with the same semantic content but allows it to form its own unique shape rather than the form of the original. And finally there is the deviant or extraneous form where the metapoem is cast into a form that is in no way implicit in either the form or the content of the original (most dissimilar to original) (France, 31). Some extracts from the interviews can point us in which section we should categorize the electronic metapoems. “The words and structure are unaltered from the reading that we received by Billy Collins. We’ve obviously given it other levels of subjective meaning by virtue of the fact we set it to sound design and images” (Tootal). This comment regarding Hunger (Collins and SamuelChristopher) leads us to set it in the category of an organic translation according to Holmes’ theory. In the sense that the content is similar to the original poem but the form is different therefore the content of the poem is the same but the form has changed from print text to digital video and audio.

Similarly, Sheehan when asked about his piece “Ten Doors Closing” answers, “I think the finished product fairly represents the original idea. The poem itself is essentially unchanged”, this would also lead us to categorize the piece according to Holmes’ theories as an organic translation. Correspondingly Parilla comments that, “the essence of the poem is the same. Of course, there are new nuances and others have been diluted”, this also points us to categorizing his digital poem “In praise of an elevator” (Schroeder and Handplant Studio) as organic. In fact most of the examples of digital poetry that have been looked at in this research fall into this category except for “The Last Day of Betty Nkomo” (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries). In this piece although the words were indeed written first, they were in fact written specifically for this piece and still appear as written words, however they are now digital and the rhythm and audio is new. There is however no added imagery, unlike the other pieces, therefore it could be categorized as analogical whereby the translation seeks to functionally parallel the form in the original’s poetic tradition.

Holmes (50) defines the verse translator’s goal as a dual one, that of “producing a text which is a translation of the original poem and is at the same time a poem in its own right within the target language”. He then extends this definition of translation further within the context of a game metaphor. Holmes compares the process of translation to a game, the goal of which is to produce an acceptable translation. The rules of the game are that the final piece must match the original enough to be considered a translation and the form is reformulated in such a way that it will be considered a poem. The same way a player in a computer game makes choices on what levels or game paths to pursue so too does a translator make choices appertaining to what form the translation shall take.

According to Holmes a poem can be defined as a “coherent textual whole” however translation itself is a dichotomy between languages, literatures and cultures (Holmes, 50). Therefore translators must accept these dichotomies and do their best to create the illusion of wholeness and each translator’s path through the game of translation is different and produces different results. Each translator will choose his or her own type of game play to negotiate through the different levels whether translating from one spoken language to another such as for example German to English or text to interactive animation.

4.         Nida’s Functional Equivalency In order to contextualize Holmes’ models it is necessary to mention Dr. Eugene Nida who formulated the translation theory of functional equivalency translation, also called dynamic equivalency, which essentially means a translation of meaning for meaning rather than word for word. It seeks to express the thought conveyed in a source text, as opposed to formal equivalence, which deals with word for word at the expense of natural expression in the target language. Both approaches to translation rely on literal fidelity to the source text. Nida (120) dealt with each sentence as a whole rather than break it down into its separate elements of words. The idea of even trying to translate poetry using formal equivalence is unbelievable as, if you were to break a poem down into separate words, it would be all but meaningless, since in poetry true meaning comes from the whole combination and order of structure and content.

Take for instance the phrase ‘a pregnant pause’, to break it up into separate words and translate the word ‘pregnant’ and then the word ‘pause’ would not adequately encompass the meaning that the phrase viewed as a whole evokes, that of a moment filled with unsaid meanings. We can see the application of this in terms of digital poetry if for example you were to have a line of a poem that is describing a pillow filled with feathers. The poetic meaning perhaps might be alluding to lightness and freedom, therefore a digital poet may choose to show an image of a bird flying. This could result in a more meaningful poetic experience than that of literally showing an image of a pillow while we hear the line of the poem in a voiceover.

The digital poem “The Dead” (Collins and Delcan) can help illustrate this point. The visuals of this piece are in fact so literal that they take over the creader’s mental visualization. In this case the animation reflects exactly through visuals the poetic imagery and as a result we are faced with an example of over literal diegesis. The poem speaks of the dead looking down on us and the animation shows this, which is very literal for such a strong poetic image, and so fails to take advantage of the expanded potentialities for meaning afforded by the digital space. Hayles’ flickering signifier is important to mention here, in the digital space a signifier according to Hayles “can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists “as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes” (Hayles, 31). If the digital space offers such potential mutability in relation to signifiers then any attempt to constrain or narrow the field of meaning is not taking advantage of the affordances of the medium. A less controlling and literal diegetic with a larger scope for mutable freedom of interpretation could potentially allow for a literary artifact that embraces rather than constrains the poetic affordances of the digital space.

Interestingly this corresponds to a moving away from literal equivalence as a working concept in translation studies. Here we can see postmodernism at work as Baudrillard’s theory regarding the simulacra and simulation proposes that simulation “stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value” (Baudrillard, 6). So to Baudrillard and translation, equivalence is a utopian axiom, to truly achieve equivalence is an impossible task. Similarly John Cayley’s The Code is not the Text (unless it is the Text) deals with “the mutual transparency and translatability of code and language” with reference to it becoming utopian in value. Cayley with reference to codework purports that the rhetoric of writing in code must be distinct and that “reading codework as code-in-language and language-in-code…risks stunning the resultant literary object, leaving it reduced to simple text-to-be-read”. This approach highlights the risk inherent in narrowing code’s hermeneutic potential to that of a visual element within a page and echoes a postmodern approach to translation, which jettisons the concept of equivalence in favour of a vastly expanded and mutable range of Hayles’ flickering signifiers.

5.         Reiss and Vermeer’s Skopos Rule Reiss and Vermeer further developed translation theory by developing the skopos rule which emphasizes the purpose of the end result of the translation and as such is relevant to the decision making process of the digital poet. Vermeer (13) postulates that it is the intended purpose of the target text that determines the translation methodologies and strategies. By this he means that the translator can determine how best to go about their translation by first determining the skopos or purpose of the target text. The translator, in this case the digital poet, or “the expert of transcultural communication decides whether a commission can and should be carried out in a specific way (form) and for a specific purpose under the given circumstances or not” (Vermeer, 31). Similarly as anyone who has created content for the digital medium will know, identifying the target audience before project development is key.

Nord (9) adds to this by purporting that it is the situation in which the target text is received that gives it its function. This gives a greater importance to the target text than Nida’s theories, which favor the source text. Snell-Hornby (20) tells us that this approach “relativizes both text and translation”; there is no one perfect translation as any translation depends on its skopos and situation. Interestingly however Reiss and Vermeer’s skopos theory is, according to Snell-Hornby (84), somewhat lacking regarding literary translation due to the special status of text and style in a literary work of art. In fact she recently stated in Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? (Snell-Hornby, 54) that Vermeer’s theory blends well with James Holmes’ theories in respect of intertextual coherence, which replaces Nida’s equivalence. Despite an adherence to equivalence Nida nonetheless understood how language changes from culture to culture as symbols and meanings are culture specific, for example the use of body parts to express emotion in language changes from culture to culture.

Nida’s translation work was mainly religious and as such he does not privilege the sign as Chomsky and structural linguists do. Rather he privileges the reaction or response to the sign, in that if his translation elicits the response that God intended then the translation is successful (Gentzler, 52). This is similar to the translation of poems in that if the digital poem elicits the response in the creader that the translator (in this case the digital poet) intended then the translation is successful. Dass (2) gives as an example a table, an object we would believe to be common worldwide in its roots and connotations and yet the meaning of a common object such as a table is not as straightforward as you might imagine. Because of this, Dass posits that it is impossible to have equivalence in translation because “each word trails various (and perhaps countless) systems of contextual associations and significations. There is an endless play of signifiers” (Dass, 3).

This too comes into play in digital poetry, for example the use of the image of a table may connote domesticity, work, stability, the mundane or perhaps luxury and modernism depending on the creader. However one advantage of digital poetry is that as all digital poetry is situated online the majority of creaders therefore must be coming from a technologically developed socio-cultural situation. A situation that has access to Internet, cinema and T.V. and therefore due to the effects of convergence (Jenkins) in contemporary society a teenager in Japan can be watching the same content as one in Ireland. Therefore the space between their cultural understandings, coding and differences decreases. For example if an Irish teenager were presented with the Facebook profile page of a Japanese student they would recognize elements on the page and be able to navigate through general areas such as profile page, photographs and videos for example. While granted they would not be able to understand the detail of the written posts and the words in a foreign language on the buttons, nonetheless a common language of symbols and icons of Facebook will exist.

Culturally specific meanings are inherent in virtually all poetic translation and often of course have multiple ramifications for the overall translation. We might equally apply these discussions to print and online culture. There are certain shared understandings for example in the online realm that allow all creaders, no matter where they are situated in the world, to understand certain functions. For example, the icon of a house on a web page usually indicates that clicking on it will bring them back to the home page of the web site even though the creader might live in an apartment.

The formal model of translation as a communication process is this: The source (S) encodes a message (M) in a specific language (A) and transmits it to a receiver (RA).  The receiver then acts as a translator and transfers (TR) the message and encodes it into a new language (B) into a new message (MB) that should be ‘equivalent to’ the original message (Holmes, 35).

However the process of transfer, the (TR) has a lot more to it than simply switching from one language to another, and the concept of the final message being ‘equivalent to’ the source message itself is loaded. “While general theorists of translation have tended to define the central problems of translating in terms of arriving at ‘equivalence’ those concerned with verse translation are inclined to despair of any such thing” (Holmes, 10).

Holmes argues where literary translation (such as verse) is concerned Barthes’ ‘classification’ of literature, into those uses of language which speak about objects and phenomenon which are external and speak about language (Holmes, 23), and the ‘secondary language or meta-language’ - which makes use of language to communicate something about literature itself - applies (Holmes, 10). What is interesting here is that this reflects Paul de Man’s (156-159) explanation of Yeats and Abrams metaphors of traditional and modern poetry, the mirror and the lamp, the mimetic and the intellectual. This is also similar to Gertrude Stein’s different kinds of knowledge: what we know because it is what we see and do, and what we know because it is what we think (Morris, 1). So if we view the original poem as falling into the first classification that which speaks of objects and the translation of the poem to fall into the second, a second language or meta-language, thus a poetic translation in this sense is a metapoem.

The metapoem is a “nexus of a complex bundle of relationships converging from two directions: from the original poem, in its language, and linked in a very specific way to the poetic tradition of that language; and from the poetic tradition of the target language, with its more or less stringent expectations regarding poetry which the metapoem, if it is to be successful as poetry, must in some measure meet” (Holmes, 24-25).

And so this delicate balance of relationships contributes to the quest to attain the most appropriate form for the metapoem. Holmes argues that the question of form is in fact crucial to the process of poetic translation. “The decision regarding the verse form to be used, made as it must be at a very early stage in the entire process, can be largely determinative for the nature and sequence of the decisions still to come” (Holmes, 25). The same early decisions regarding the “verse form to be used” are similarly important when translating analogue poem to digital media.

The digital poet Mateo Parilla tells us that his “objective was to communicate the poet’s meaning. Although I think it is impossible to do this because when you read a novel or a poem, you will always get a mental visualization of what you are reading.  And this mental visualization of each one is different”. Here Parilla is making a valid point that although the digital poets set out to communicate the poet’s original meaning in their translation this is a nearly impossible task as through the digital poets’ reading they create their own interpretation. This is similar to Holmes’ (84) model of poetry translation whereby the translator is a reader first by the act of decoding the poem and only then goes on to recode it in its new language or form through translation. Interestingly O’Hagan and Ashworth (151-152) list similar concepts from Fillmore and Seleskovitch. Fillmore proposes semantics of scenes and frames, that is to say if the translation can evoke the same scene in the reader’s mind upon reading the translation then the translator’s use of “frame” is successful (O’Hagan and Ashworth, 151-152).

6.         Holmes’ Levels of Translation In addition to the problem of form there exists a much wider range of problems that translation faces. In his paper Rebuilding the Bridge at Bommel: Notes on the Limits of Translatability (45-51), Holmes offers as examples the problems of the different syntax of various languages and cultural references such as place names. Interestingly Dass (20) outlines Derrida’s proposition that names cannot be translated, that in fact they point to the necessity and the impossibility of translation. “By its very nature, a proper name does not belong to a language, though and because it lends possibility to that language. Its translation occurs when it allows itself to be inscribed in that language, that is interpreted by its [the language’s] semantic equivalent” (Dass, 22). This demonstrates the vast array of problems and choices and paths that a translator faces. The choices made by the translator at the start of this process will dictate the path the rest of the poem will take and automatically shut off certain choices and open others (Holmes, 45-47).

Holmes states (47) that problems such as these that arise from the translation of poetry can be set into three levels.

i.          The first level is a poem’s linguistic context, the significations of the words of the poem draw upon the meanings and context of the specific language used.

ii.         The second is the literary intertext, as the first level has to do with the context of the meanings of words in a specific language so the second plane has to do with the linkages of different texts or bodies of poetry within that literary tradition. This refers to a poem’s interaction with imagery and rhythms and themes of other texts within that textual framework. It was Ezra Pound’s view that all poetry involved endless links and connections with writers from other times and cultures, reshaped and rethought through his own individualistic process (Bassnett, 143). Similarly Roland Barthes stated in his 1968 paper The Death of the Author that “a text is made of multiple writings drawn from many cultures” (Buescu and Duarte, 173). In digital poetry not only do we have the potential for links to other literary works but also the visual and aural elements mean that digital poems can potentially reference films, games, animations. For example the background audio could be reminiscent of the Jaws movie theme song adding to the suspense and dread in a piece. Alternatively the font used in a piece brings to mind a retro movie poster so adding an extra dimension to the creader’s poetic experience. This is similar to the sense in which O’Hagan and Ashworth (152) speak of the capabilities endowed in the shared mediated communication space afforded by environments (in this instance the digital poem) that allow multimodal and multimedia communications. In this case the sender and receiver can begin to explore each other’s understanding of the intended meaning of the message.

iii.        The third and final level Holmes suggests is a poem’s socio-cultural situation, as the first level dealt with language and the second level dealt with texts so this level deals with society and culture. Objects, symbols and abstract concepts will, depending on the specific socio-cultural situation, function differently. The translator has to negotiate all three levels when translating.  Therefore this allows for the differences in meaning in poetry from those regions that have a different culture but have a similar language such as France and Quebec for example. In this example the linguistic context of French is similar but the socio-cultural situations are different. Or vice-versa other regions might have a different linguistic context but a similar socio-cultural situation such as within Ireland where both Irish and English are spoken. The socio-cultural situation is the same as it is the same country, people and culture but the linguistic context is different, as there exists the Irish language and the English language. For example an Irish person in Ireland who speaks English could have the same socio-cultural situation as an Irish person in Ireland who speaks Irish but a different linguistic context.

Holmes’ view of poetry in relation to these three levels is reiterated by Bassnet (134) when she states “to arrive at an understanding of literature is to acknowledge that there are relationships between writers and the texts which they produce, relationships which cross temporal, linguistic and cultural boundaries”. According to Holmes (47) the basic problem that the poetry translator (who has set out to create a text that is closely related enough to the original to be called a translation and that also displays enough of the basic characteristics in the target language to be called a poem) faces, is the fact that the translator not only has to shift the original poem to another linguistic context but also to another literary intertext and socio-cultural situation. The range of choice presented to the translator ranges from the exoticizing to the naturalizing plane, and the historicizing to the modernizing plane. In these planes a translation can range from being the most different (exoticizing) or similar (naturalizing) to the source text. As well as this a translation may take a historical (historicizing) form or contain historical content as opposed to a modern, contemporary form and/or content (modernizing). Similarly Williams (14) states that the “greatest challenge in poetry translation is to translate in such a way that both the potentiality of meanings and the linguistic nuances of the …poem are available in the poem in the other language. The fact that this may be ultimately unattainable is not an argument for abandoning the translation project”.

Monica Ong is an example of a digital poet dealing with problems such as this is by situating “Fallow” (Givens and Ong) in a historical context and specific socio-cultural situation. Evidence to support this can be seen in the response: “When I read ‘Fallow’, I sense a voice of longing, lingering in a time passed.  I ended up visiting many antique shops in the rural part of Hudson Valley where I collected vintage postcards. I think there is something about old correspondences, letters and belongings that evoke that same longing” (Ong). In fact in Ong’s piece “Fallow” (Givens and Ong) we can see graphics of these same vintage photos, postcards and letters; her response as well as the visuals of the piece indicate Hudson Valley, 1950 or 1960s rural America in the state of New York. Incorporating the digital aspect into Holmes’ translation models introduces an interesting complexity to the process. For example the digital form of Monica Ong’s translation places it towards the modernizing end of the spectrum while simultaneously its content of photographs and postcards from the past can be seen to situate it more towards the historicizing end.

Dylan Sheehan situates his piece “Ten Doors Closing” within a specific socio-cultural context, namely that of contemporary London city life. With its shots of the urban underground and characters in contemporary clothing going about modern tasks that most creaders can identify with, such as catching the last train at night. Considering that the content of the poem references ancient Greece and the story of Orpheus it has even more impact for the creader. This due to the dynamic tension brought about by the marriage of contraries (see Orr’s [1996] temperaments of poetry) at play between the contrasts of the old and new, modern and ancient. So in this case if we follow Holmes’ theories, the socio-cultural situation (contemporary London underground) would be charted in the modernizing realm and the literary intertext (story of Orpheus in Hades) would be charted in the historicizing. Another example “Hunger” (Collins and SamuelChristopher) through the use of contemporary urban-scapes for the visuals of the digital poem is also situated within a socio-cultural situation, that of contemporary urban city life in the Western world.

The use of Asian traditional music as the soundtrack in “The Last Day of Betty Nkomo” (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries) situates it within a different socio-cultural situation. This is also reflected in the literary intertext, as the text is reminiscent of a Japanese haiku, however the linguistic context is modern western English. It seems to be the case in most of the digital poems that the choice of music and or graphics contribute to placing the piece in a socio-cultural situation and increased poetic impact can be arrived at by the combination of the socio-cultural situation, the linguistic context and the literary intertext. However, as in “A Servant. A Hanging. A Paper House.” (Anderton and Robinson), it is not as obvious in this piece what part the music, graphics, or text have to play regarding the socio-cultural situation, literary intertext, or linguistic context. The choice of song is crackly and old but it is impossible to make out the words. The text is modern English so that does give us a literary intertext. The graphics contribute to the same historical feeling by showing some scratches and water damage stains, the visuals show remote rural countryside but more than that is hard to discern.

7.         Holmes’ Serial and Structural Planes Holmes also proposes that when a poem is translated it takes place on two planes, a serial plane and a structural plane. The serial plane deals with translating sentence by sentence and the structural plane deals with the overview translation “on which one abstracts a ‘mental conception’ of the original text. This mental conception is then used as a kind of general criterion against which to test each sentence during the formulation of the new translated text” (Holmes, 82). What this means is that when translating a poem it is not enough to translate the individual elements but also the overall sense of the piece.

There is clear evidence in the digital poet interview responses to link to Holmes’ structural and serial planes. The structural plane deals with the overview translation and nearly all interviewees mention reading the poem in its entirety first and then begin to deal with the poem line-by-line or couplet-by-couplet. So we start with the structural plane and then move to the serial plane which Holmes states deals with sentence by sentence or what Young-Hae Chang calls “key frame by key frame” or as the digital poet Bill Dorris suggests “word by word”.  For example, many respondents stress the importance of immersing oneself in the poem at the beginning of the process. Such as “The poet sent me the poem. I read it carefully, out loud, repeatedly” (Ong). Also Robinson “The first thing I did was read the poem that was emailed to me and reflect on the overall themes and my own personal interpretations. Then I isolated each two-line segment and read it several times while writing down any imagery that came to mind”. Despite the majority of respondents stating they were trying to put the poet’s interpretation across it is also clear that the majority spent some time developing their own interpretation before beginning work. Sam Tootal states this explicitly when he tells us “It is entirely our interpretation of the poem” and that he and his partner worked “Line by line”. This is a particularly evocative piece so perhaps this freedom from worrying about the poet’s interpretation liberated them and allowed them to concentrate on evoking their interpretation. 

Conclusion So what conclusions can we draw from this? One important conclusion is that the digital poets and translators are in fact the digital media technologists. These are in fact the poets and poetry translators of the electronic age, not the original analogue poets. Regardless whether the digital poem is an organic, analogous or mimetic translation, as per Holmes’ (26-27), it is clear that it is the digital poets who are making the creative decisions and putting forward their own interpretation. The only exception to this is when the digital poet is also the poet, for example in the case of Dylan Sheehan’s “Ten Doors Closing”.

What is interesting regarding translation theory is that although the translators are first and foremost digital media practitioners and their focus is on the explicit or implicit characteristics of the digital media, many aspects of Holmes’ classic model regarding analogue translation are still evident. This comes about despite these aspects not being consciously considered by the translators or digital poets when translating to digital media.

We can see therefore through application of Holmes’ (26-27) theories of translation to digital poetry examples and digital poet interviews, they did indeed create translations that were mimetic, analogical, organic, or deviant. Although, as we have seen, the majority of the digital poems discussed fell into the category of organic translations whereby the content was similar to the original poem but the form was different. Evidence of translation on both the structural and serial planes is also apparent. Translations were also clearly seen to be charted, albeit unknowingly, within a linguistic context, a literary intertext, and a socio-cultural situation. Quite often we saw the potential for audio and graphics to place the translations within a specific socio-cultural situation and the text and/or voice-over placed it within a literary intertext and linguistic context as in the case of, for example, “The Last Day of Betty Nkomo” (Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries). In this digital poem English words in modern western large black Monaco font are used in conjunction with old-style Korean music towards simple but effective poetic effect.

We can also see how translation theory can be usefully used to examine the change from print to pixel. It allows us to begin to unlock the digital poems towards a comparative examination that helps us begin to identify what really has changed in the move from analogue to digital. Furthermore thanks to translation theorists’ postmodern jettisoning of the notion of equivalence we instead can find a model, such as Holmes’ poetry translation theory, that is potentially ideally suited to the mutability of the digital medium. The acceptance of mutable signifiers in multilingual poetry translation corresponds to the mutability of actors and signifiers that inhabit an expanded range of potentialities in digital poetics. However while recognizing these potentialities of difference, simultaneously we find commonalities of signification in the digital that span languages and cultures. This leads us to a core conclusion that poetry translation theory allows us to recognize that whilst the digital medium can be seen to operate like a language, it can also simultaneously be seen to operate as many languages all at once.

 

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[1] Creader: a combination of the words creator and reader to refer to what Barthes (1970) termed the

active reader. Digital content may require reading, viewing, listening, playing or using. Therefore for

this paper when appropriate I will replace the terms user, viewer, and reader with the single term

creader.

[2] Some examples of digital poetry from practitioners and theorists, such as John Cayley, Brian Lennon, Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, Ted Warnell, and Jessica Loseby, code or code elements seep onto a screen to be read not by the apparatus but by the human audience and the result is a digital composition which Alan Sondheim calls codework (Morris, 29).

[3] Adobe Flash: multimedia authoring software. Previously known as Macromedia Flash prior to Adobe’s

purchase of Macromedia.