Meet, Greet, Translate: Mapping Happenstances and Network-Driven Translations in Contemporary Literary Transfers

This essay explores the role played by randomness in contemporary poetry translation. I argue that translation happenstance—an instance of cultural transfer that is not part of a pattern and is unlikely to replicate—is a useful concept that explains the decentralized, highly sinuous, and unpredictable context of poetry translation, especially in small, non-hegemonic countries. Happenstances may be one-time occurrences or may evolve into network-driven translations—transfers in which an individual’s circle of friends and acquaintances play a mediation role and which develop according to the agents that join the network. Burrowing into the nooks and cranes of printed periodical publications in Romania between 2007 and 2017, this contribution uses a mixed-method approach to investigate computationally (via distant reading) and via close reading the network of contemporary poets, translators, and publications that engaged in a sustained reciprocal translation dialogue with the United States and Canada and concludes that agent-based network models of historical and bibliographic resources are needed in order to account for the complexity of any literary translation act.