Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
community and seen as requiring special expertise to produce (Dizdar’s Kameni
spavač, for example). If the notion of community is a shared mental schema that is
negotiated via discourse and performed in action, however, the same is true for
that community’s culture. Thus cultural beliefs, products, customs, and behav-
iours, plus their social meanings, are dependent on context and may change.
Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s, Dizdar’s image of Bosnia as one ‘heretic faithful’
people fitted with a widespread celebration of regional culture within Yugoslavia- a trend encouraged by Yugoslavia’s rulers, who thought this would defuse de-
mands for regional independence (Buturović 2002; Wachtel 1998). In the 1990s,
however, Dizdar’s work became seen as an iconic symbol of Bosnian identity by
those who supported Bosnian independence.
By extension, ‘culture’ may also be used to label the community itself. This is
because an otherwise disparate group can use shared cultural features to define
themselves as a networked community – shared experience of a multi-faith soci-
ety in cosmopolitanist models of Bosnian culture, for example.
All these concepts of culture are implicit in the common image of literary
translators as ‘communicators between cultures’. By belonging to at least one third-
order community (such as UK society, in my case), poetry translators participate in
that community’s culture; but they also communicate cultural products from other
communities (Bosnian or ex-Yugoslav, for instance). Hence, Tymoczko argues, lit-
erary translators work within, and are committed to, a cultural framework that
spans source and receptor cultures (2003: 196–201). Tymoczko also regards liter-
ary translators as partial, in both senses of the term (2000: 24). They can translate
only part of a source culture’s texts, and only part of a source text’s meanings. But
this makes them partisan: the texts and the meanings they do translate inevitably
reflect their own personae and views. This double partiality also makes poetry
translators not just communicators, but also active mediators between cultures.
This mediation has been modelled in several ways. One paradigm may be
called translation as inter-community power-play (e.g. Venuti 1995, 1998; Álvarez
and Vidal 1996; Casanova 2002/2010). This views the source and receptor com-
munities as separate and holding potentially different amounts of cultural, eco-
nomic or socio-political power. How translators (to whom one might add other
project-team players) engage with this power relationship is seen as crucial for the
project’s social impact. My motivation for joining the essay project, for instance,
was linked to a wider campaign to persuade Western powers to help bring about a
just peace in Bosnia. Thus I saw myself as allying myself with a less powerful source
community (cosmopolitanist Bosnians) against a more powerful receptor com-
munity (Western Europe/USA).
A second paradigm may be called translation as intercultural ambassadorship
(e.g. Jones 2000). This presents more an intercultural than an intercommunal