Cultural Transfer in Translation

The chapter sets out to investigate the rendering of cultural elements in the process of poetry translation, an undertaking that is a strenuous one, given the constraints of form. It looks into and illustrates the many layers of Seamus Heaney&s;s poetry, pointing at the profusion of allusions to cultural aspects that are embedded in the texts, and that ask the translator to decide whether to ‘foreignize’ or ‘domesticate’ the text. These extratextual features that a translator needs to consider are imbricated with the various textual elements, generating effects that are difficult to replicate in translation, making similarity of effect all the more difficult to achieve. The chapter will analyse several translations of Heaney&s;s poems into Romanian and will assess the gains and losses at various levels, with a view to evaluating the possibility of achieving equivalence of effect in readers who may not be familiar with specific cultural allusions or fleeting references embedded in the source-language poems.