Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
in two ways. Poetry translators often have to liaise with text transmitters – in my
case, proofreading for publisher P before the manuscript went to press (McEwan
1991: 919; Bishop 2000; Flynn 2004: 277). Secondly, poetry translators may them-
selves act as text transmitters – for example, when I wrote a Bosnian newspaper
article publicizing the volume (Jones 1996).2.6.2 Situation, motives, power
All this first-order action takes place in a situational context, and is informed by
certain motives. With the translated essay collection, the situational context was
geographically ‘distributed’ (Jones 2009: 320), with action taking place in three
countries: E’s, P’s and T1’s work in Bosnia under siege conditions, my work in the
UK, and printing in Slovenia. This is linked to non-human agency – a strong reli-
ance on e-mail communication, for example. The project’s motive, as mentioned
earlier, was to influence international public opinion by broadcasting E’s ideas. This
was linked to the choice of target language: English, a highly globalized language.
Some actors carry greater power than others. This Bourdieu refers to as the
‘capital’ owned by an actor, or indeed a network (Inghilleri 2005; Gouanvic 2005).
Capital may be ‘economic’, say – as with the funds accessed by E and P to publish
the book. Or ‘symbolic’ (carrying status or prestige), ‘social’ (involving social net-
works and connections), or ‘cultural’ (carrying cultural power or influence). Thus,
for Bosnian readers, especially Muslims, the cultural capital of the Dizdar and
Qur’an quotes add to E’s own symbolic capital as a politician and philosopher.
Power may also be viewed in terms of how it used: Actor Network Theory, for in-
stance, focuses on an actor’s power to recruit other actors. This identifies E as the
most powerful actor: he not only wrote the source-language book (itself a power-
ful actor, because it influences most target-text actions, such as my adding the
Dizdar quote), but also enlisted T1 and myself to translate it, for instance.
This also ties in with situational context. With the case study, most capital and
network power was centred in the source country, Bosnia. This meant that source-
country rather than target-country actors determined the project’s object, motive
and goals.2.7 Second-order networks
The first-order team is linked into wider, second-order networks relevant to either
the translation project or the social roles played by team members. Crucial to the
translator’s action are three types of second-order network: interest networks,
fields, and systems.