Poetry Translating as Expert Action
could choose between four such affiliations. Three depended on religious-cultural
heritage rather than birth region or home dialect per se: the Croatian and Serbian
narodi defined themselves largely in terms of Catholic and Orthodox Christian
heritage respectively, and the Muslim narod in terms of Islamic heritage. A small
minority took the fourth option of declaring themselves ‘Yugoslav’. All republike
had a mixture of narodi – thus most of Croatia’s citizens declared their nationhood
as Croatian, but a sizeable minority declared their nationhood as Serbian. In Bosnia,
even the biggest nation (Muslims) formed only 40% of the 1981 population, with
Serbs and Croats forming 32% and 18% respectively (Woodward 1995: 33).
As the cohesive power of Communism waned after Tito’s death in 1980,
Yugoslavia was hit by economic crisis, exacerbated by political stalemate between
republike. By the mid-1980s, Yugoslav ‘civic-political nationalism’ (politics of iden-
tity based on allegiance to state: Hutchinson and Smith 1994: 4–5,11) was rapidly
eroding with the growth of local ‘ethnonationalist’ movements (based on alle-
giance to nation, i.e. to a sense of shared ethnicity: ibid.). In contrast to Commu-
nist Yugoslavia’s affirmation of majority and minority national rights, these fol-
lowed ‘pernicious nationalist’ agendas (claiming rights for one’s own community
whilst negating other communities’ rights: Miščević 2005), underpinned by what
Derrida called the myth of ‘ontopology’, where identity is equated with territory
(in Campbell 1998: 78–81). These movements, which gained government power
in most republike with the first multi-party elections around 1990, sought to free
the home nation from the real or imagined oppression of other nations, redefining
the republika’s interests as those of its majority nation, whilst defining a nation’s
territory as encompassing all areas where its members lived. Thus Croatian eth-
nonationalism, for instance, privileged ethnic Croats within Croatia whilst deny-
ing full citizenship to Croatia’s Serbian minority, but also sought to unite Croatia
proper with parts of Bosnia populated by Croats. As Yugoslav republike declared
independence (Figure 1), such mutually exclusive demands on shared territory –
or, more often, fear of such demands by neighbouring nations – fuelled wars char-
acterised by massacre, mass rape and forced expulsion of other nations.
In Bosnia, free elections in 1990 led to an unstable ruling alliance between
‘Bosniak’ (Bosnian Muslim), Croatian, and Serbian ethnonationalist parties. After
Croatia and Slovenia became independent in 1991, Bosniak and Bosnian-Croat
leaders feared second-class status in a Yugoslavia dominated by the ethnonational-
ist regime of Serbia. Hence the Bosnian government declared independence in
1992 – based, officially at least, on ‘cosmopolitanist’ principles (that political or-
ganization has a moral obligation to everyone, irrespective of nation: Miščević
2005). War immediately broke out with a Bosnian Serb ethnonationalist uprising,
backed militarily by Serbia proper. Later, ethnonationalist Croats, backed mili-
tarily by Croatia proper, also rebelled. Inevitably, what remained of Bosnian