Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface 

all upon it as created by the devil, and Christ as pure light rather than crucified

flesh – and that the stećci were the tombs of the heretic faithful, who had been

persecuted for their ‘impure’ faith. Then came a third captivation: the masterwork

of Bosnian twentieth-century poetry, Kameni spavač (‘Stone Sleeper’, 1973) of Mak

Dizdar (1917–1972) – a dialogue between the poet, the heretics, and the heretic-

hunters of the established church.

On winter days in the neo-Orientalist gloom of the Bosnian National Library,

I began translating Kameni spavač, surrounded by the work’s various editions, by

dictionaries of modern Serbo-Croatian and Old Church Slavonic, by anti-heretical

tracts and compilations of South Slav folklore. Over the following 15 years, while

living in the Netherlands, Greece and then Britain, I continued to work on Kameni

spavač between translation jobs for living poets.

Ethnicity was central to citizenship in late-socialist Yugoslavia^2. ‘Nations’

(narodi) were the main officially-designated ethnic groups; BCS native speakers

Figure 2. Stećak (Radimlje necropolis, Bosnia)

2. For histories of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, see Woodward (1995), Malcolm (1996), Silber and
   Little (1997), and Campbell (1998).