Poetry Translating as Expert Action
Though there were no postal links with the besieged city, there were satellite links.
When I e-mailed the revised article to E, I supplied my own English translation of
the Dizdar extract, mentioning that I was working on Kameni spavač and had
translated over half the book. This, E later told me, coincided with a plan that he
and P had formulated in a cellar during a bombardment: to publish Kameni spavač
in a major European language. Two weeks after my e-mail, E and P had arranged
to produce a bilingual edition using my translations.
The English edition of E’s essays appeared a few months after the war’s end
(Mahmutćehajić 1994/1996). The publisher was Oslobođenje, the imprint of the
Sarajevo daily newspaper; co-publisher was the UK-based Islamic Texts Society,
and the book was printed in Slovenia. The full bilingual Kameni spavač/Stone
Sleeper appeared three years later (Dizdar 1973/1999).2.3 The foundations of a model
2.3.1 Action, context and subjectivity
So how might this case study help to sketch a framework of poetry translating?
Most obviously, it confirms that poetry translation is personal, interpersonal and
poetic action within a complex real-life context. It shows how translating, editing
and publishing processes depend on the motives, life stories and personae of their
main actors (translator T1 and myself, editor E and publisher P), on whether these
actors happen to meet, and on how they interact. The context is partially textual- for example, the intersection of E’s essays, Dizdar’s Kameni spavač and the Qur’an
in their various forms (source and receptor language, preliminary and published
versions), but also the wider textual networks that Even-Zohar calls “systems”
(2000). Relevant systems might be the poetic works in 1960s-1970s Yugoslavia
that, like Kameni spavač, used local history, geography or mythology to explore
universal concerns, or English texts analyzing the Bosnian war. The context is also
socio-political (the book’s aim of engaging international support for a cosmopoli-
tanist narrative of Bosnia, for example), physical (such as the use of e-mail rather
than paper communications in a post-modern siege), and more besides.
Action begins with the self. German critical psychologists describe selfhood
as ‘subjectivity’, which has four “central characteristics”: cognition, emotion, con-
scious relation, and action (Axel 1997: 142). People, therefore, are subject to, or
conditioned by, both the inner worlds of thought and feeling, and the outer
worlds of interacting and doing. In any situation, all characteristics interact. Ac-
tion, for instance, is not a simple effect of external conditions. In Holzkamp’s
words (1983, in Schraube 2000: 49, emphases removed), “humans do not live