Literary translation can be seen as the translation of style because it is the style of a text which allows the text to function as literature. One way of putting this is to say that the style, as the direct reflection of the author's choices, carries the speaker's meaning, both conscious and unconscious, and so the translation of a literary text is the translation of a particular cognitive state as it has become embodied in the text. It is in this sense that a translation can, as Shelley put it in 1840 "spring again from its seed" (Brett-Smith 1972:29). However, because of the translator's role as active participant in creating a textual reading, different readers will read the same text differently, will engage with its implicatures differently and will produce different translations reflecting different aspects of the mind behind the text. Here I shall use the term "reading", in a similar sense to that used by Scott (2000), to mean both the process of reading and its product, whereby the product is dynamic, variable and open, specificallý encouraging a search for contexts. I will tend to use the term 'interpretation' to mean a particular understanding of a text which the interpreter feels is as good an understanding as can be reached; this is different from the way the two terms are used by Stockwell (2002a:8).

Almost all texts indicate in their style the cognitive state of the speaker or writer. This may be the actual writer of the text or a persona taken on by the writer, a representation of a character, or even a composite of several writers, as when a journalist's description of an event carries traces of both her/his view and that of the newspaper for whom s/he writes. However, style is most clearly a representation of a cognitive state when the text does not purport to be about a true state of affairs. In a recent article (Boase-Beier 2003а), I use Morgenstern's The Two Donkeys' as an example of a poem about a fictional world: it cannot be about two donkeys in the real world because the donkey characters in the poem get married and hold a conversation. This is the poem, followed by two different translations:

Ein   finstrer   Esel       sprach   einmal

a     gloomy  donkey   said       once

zu   seinem   ehelichen    Gemahl:

to   his          wedded       spouse

"Ich    bin    so    dumm,   du    bist    so    dumm,

  I       am    so    stupid    you   are     so    stupid

Wir   wollen sterben gehen, komm!”

we   want    to-die   go        come

Doch  wie    es   kommt    so      öfter            eben:

but     as      it    comes     thus   more-often  in-fact

Die    beiden  blieben     fröhlich   leben.

the    two       stayed      happily    to-live

                                                        (Morgenstern in Arndt 1993:15)

A gloomy ass one morning said

Unto his mate of board and bed:

"I am so dumb, you are so dumb,

Let us seek death together, come!”

As it turned out (and often will)

The two are blithely living still.

                                                      (Arndt 1993:15)

A dismal donkey, tired of life

Said to his lawful wedded wife:

"We are so stupid, you and I,

Why don't we just go off and die?"

But habit dies hard, as folks say

And they are living to this day.

                                                     (Bell 1992:n.p.)

The poem ironically suggests, by means of formal language used about the two donkeys as well as the fact that they are married, speak, consider themselves stupid, contemplate suicide but do not сarry it out, that neither the institution of marriage, nor the despair of people who feel life is not worth living, should be taken too seriously. But the ironical mind style is represented very differently in the two different translations. Arndt's translation, possibly about metaphorical donkeys, reflects the ironical representation of German pedantry in language and institutions, whereas Bell's has more of the feel of a folk rhyme, and reflects the monotony of life and people's tendency to be creatures of habit. What the article in question, which considers these two translations, attempts to show is that the reader adapts the reconstruction to his or her own view of the world" (Boase-Beier 2003а:263). Arndt's view of the world, I argue, is influenced by the fact that he is an academic, a translator of Pushkin and Goethe, interested, as his Introduction shows, in Morgenstern's concern with the conventions of language and their subversion in language play. Bell's view is influenced by her translations of children's literature and her interest in the folktale elements of the poem. Her book contains an illustration of real donkeys in human clothes, something that, in cognitive terms, could be seen to suggest a blend, a mental representation in which elements of different worlds co-exist (Stockwell 2002a:97). Here these two worlds are the real and the fairytale world. Each translation is thus a product of a particular interpretation of the source text, in each case profoundly affected by the individual translator's cognitive context, that is, by her or his circumstances, beliefs, interests and views. My reading of these translations is also (as I assume the translator's reading of the source text is) an attempt to reconstruct a mind style as perceived through what is distinctive about the manner of expression (to use Wales'definition of style 2001:371 again).

Ideally a translation will leave the text open to as many readings as possible, rather than forcing its reader to accept one interpretation over another. However, because literaгy reading shares with other types of communication a search for meaning, even though literaгy reading differs in focussing on the search itself rather than its attainment, we are constantly, as readers and translators, behaving as though there were in fact a privileged interpretation or set of interpretations. Perhaps one thing stylistic awareness can hope to achieve is that the translator will recognize this tendency and also recognize the tendency of literature to run counter to it. Just as a critical analysis which starts from a particular interpretation is unlikely to do justice to the text it aims to analyse, so, if the reading of the source text tends towards a fixed interpretation, then there can be little hope that the resulting translation will do justice to the original text, or will itself work as literature.

To see how the notion of mind style might affect the process of translation, let us take up in more detail an example from 2.3, the poem by Ernst Meister 'Entschlafen', which begins with the foregrounded word "entschlafen":