Following the assumption of maximal rather than optimal relevance involves accepting that the input to the reading of a text may be enormous. It may not extend to selling one's house or turning one's back on society (though even this is possible), but it might well mean we want to maximize output to such an extent that we are prepared to devote to the reading of a poem, or a sacred text, or the work of a philosopher, a whole afternoon, a year, or a lifetime, because the output is equally limitless. And if the output is limitless, as in the reading of such texts it might be,then we would expect the effort to be correspondingly great.This view of literary texts offers one way of explaining the Reader-Response view that a literary text is often "a cascade of possibilities" (Iser 2004:14) for the perceiver. It also suggests that Venuti (2000:334) misinterprets Gutt when he says that the reader is characterized by an overwhelming desire for minimal processing effort. This is in fact not what Gutt says: on the contrary, he emphasizes the "reward" (2000:156) that the processing of weak implicatures brings.(whether in the terms favoured by Katz (1990) or Dowling (1999) or Gutt (2000) does not matter) between what the words mean in a basic (lexical-semantic) sense, on the one hand (the meaning of "cloud" as a noun and as a verb), and what they implicate (for example in the ambiguous structure "mind clouds") on the other. The first is sometimes referred to in pragmatics as utterance meaning or sentence meaning (Mey 2001:43) and the second, unhelpfully for our purposes, as "speaker's meaning". Assuming that as translators we are consciously constructing what we assume (and know that we merely assume) to be an inferred speaker's or author's meaning (or that of the voice in the text, which may not be the author's),I would prefer to call this reader's meaning". If a literary text in particular is deliberately organized in such a way as to almost compel readers to read, as it were, their own concept of the thing meant"(Wilss 1996:27) inito the text, and bearing in mind that the translator's concept of the thing meant" will be affected by reading for translation (see section 1.5), I propose to use "translator's meaning" for the extended meaning which goes beyond what can be assigned to the text or passage on the basis of semantics. Looking at the passage from Thomas' poem, utterance meaning would be the sort of thing that goes into a gloss, including information on possible word categories and semantics, whereas the translator's meaning would include the further religious, philosophical and stylistic meanings that the text implicates. Such meanings are not finite; as Pilkington (1996:159) points out, there is both "the problem of saying exactly what range of implicatures are communicated and the problem that sources of poetic effects are difficult, if not impossible, to translate (ibid).
Yet the fact that these are the "weakly implied"meanings, the gaps which, as a literary text, these lines invite me to fill, means that the other side of the difficulty is that I could in fact proceed to do a translation based on a gloss without any further knowledge of the source text than that gives.I would simply have more gaps to fill and fewer clues and guidelines to shape the process. In fact, this is what frequently happens, when translators translate out of languages they do not speak. It is how Hughes himself produced the poem 'The Prophet' (Weissbort 1989:15), a translation of Pushkin's poem. It is also the way we judge translation, especially when we cannot fully appreciate the nuances of the source text. In these cases, the easy part to judge is primary or utterance meaning, and this is frequently the basis for evaluations of translation, especially within a language-learning situation or in reviews. Similarly, the straightforward part of a translator's task (and a machine could do it) is the primary meaning. The interesting part, the real translation, is those second-order meanings, the translator's meanings which reside largely in the style, and take on particular importance for the act of literary translation. In his 1998 book Translating Style, Parks notices that the passages in translations which show most stylistic deviation from the original "point to the peculiar nature of [the author's] style and the overall vision it implies" (p.vii). Style will be less important in a non-literary text and such texts, by their nature, will not encourage the reader to maximize relevance. The sound repetition in an advert, such as you can – Canon" will serve a mnemonic purpose, and will provide a pleasurable reading experience, thus encouraging purchase. But it is not likely that it expresses anything else and the reader is unlikely to try and get further effects from it. If the text were constructed in such a way as to encourage a maxmax" rather than minimax" reading, then it might well fail in its object.
So what are the cognitive effects that maxmax reading engenders? Pilkington (2000:184) points particularly to the affective use of language in
literature: [o]ne can come to have the feeling as a result of reading the words. And yet we should be aware that the experiencing of emotion is in part also precognitive. According to Crisp (2003:379),"you may react with fear to a half-perceived shape before you infer that it is or is not a snake", and indeed experiments have supported this view, as a recent article 'All in the Mind' (Wellcome Science 1, 2005) shows. This suggests that even superficial reading may trigger emotions, which are then heightened or prolonged when cognition is exercised, and when our thought and beliefs are examined, as in literature.
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