Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
translations themselves. Resistance may also have been strengthened by receptor-
culture schemata, surviving from the Cold War, of ‘Eastern European poetry’ as
poetry of political protest (Sampson 2001: 83).
During the 1990s, this emphasis by teams and reviewers was almost certainly
inspired by sympathy with the trauma of the Bosnian war and the wish to oppose
it. But its survival well into the 2000s risks perpetuating Balkanist images of Bosnia
as strife and mayhem. This echoes Casanova’s claim that translated texts can fur-
ther an already-dominant receptor culture ’s values, because “mediators” may only
let through texts which conform to those values (2002/2010). Moreover, by down-
playing how recent Bosnian poetry explores less dramatic but no less crucial issues
of home and identity, or by downplaying images of Bosnian poetry as ‘just poetry’,
such mediators disrupt signals from source poets positioning themselves not as a
Balkanist ‘them’, but as a world ‘us’.
Finally, the greater openness of publishers than reviewers to more recent
source-poetry developments suggests that interpersonal input may be crucial in
revising one’s knowledge schemata – in this case, by “accretion” (Stockwell
2002: 79), or the addition of new information. Publishers are networked into pro-
duction teams, even if loosely, thus opening their pre-existing schemata to revi-
sion not only (like reviewers) by reading, but also (unlike reviewers) by discourse
with source-culture insiders.3.5 Afterword
This study has examined more closely how the poetry translator’s actions form
part of a complex mesh of team actions. It has analysed how these joint actions
shape and are shaped by cultural and socio-political relations between groups
within the source- and receptor-language community, and between the two com-
munities themselves. This encompasses the ‘networks’ of the book’s sub-title. Now
that this crucial context has been established, the next three chapters examine the
‘priorities’ and ‘processes’: how poetry translators view themselves and their task,
and how they actually translate poems.