Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

CROATIA

(19 91)

SLOVENIA

(19 91)

BOSNIA &

HERZEGOVINA

(19 92)

MACEDONIA

(19 93)

Belgrade

SERBIA

(2006)

Podgorica

Sarajevo

Zagreb

Ljubljana

Skopje

1995 partition of Bosnia & Herzegovina

Republika Srpska

Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

( ): year of independence

[ ]: independence recognized by minority

of UN members only

Priština

[KOSOVO]

(2008)

MONTE-

NEGRO

(2006)

Figure 1. The Yugoslav successor states in 2010: Sketch map

2.2 Context: Poetry and political prose

Before using it to model poetry translating, the case study needs putting in con-

text. In the late 1970s, while Yugoslavia was still a single-party Communist state

under the relatively liberal rule of the aging President Tito, I was an exchange stu-

dent in Sarajevo, capital of the Bosnian republika. I then started translating poetry,

most of it by Bosnian and Serbian poets.

I also became captivated by the Bosnian stećci^1 , medieval tombstones carved

with enigmatic symbols – crosses and crescents, dragons and dancers, a soldier

with a vast upraised right hand and a sun for a head: see Figure 2 and Bihalji-Merin

et al. (1963). The then widely-believed interpretation for these symbols captivated

me even more. This held that the medieval Bosnian kingdom had adopted as its

main religion the Bogomil heresy, a radical Christian sect that saw the earth and

1. The nominative singular form is stećak.