Poetry Translating as Expert Action
divide, and sees the translator as bridging it by representing the interests of the
source writer and culture (Mak Dizdar and Bosnian poetry, say) to the receptor
community (UK/US readers, say).
A third paradigm may be called translation as glocalized hybridity. This sees
literary translators neither as standing on one side of a divide nor as bridging it.
Instead, they operate in a trans-cultural space, owing allegiance to “the overlaps of
cultures” (Pym 2003; cf. Tymoczko 2003). Within this space, translation “glocal-
izes” (Wang 2004). That is, it simultaneously globalizes and localizes, adapting the
local and/or global concerns in the source text towards the needs of an interna-
tional and/or other local audience – adapting E’s political concerns, say, to the
needs and textual expectations of a world and/or UK/US readership. It also ‘hy-
bridizes’: it produces a “site of new meaning” by merging or juxtaposing source
and receptor ideas and forms, each of which may derive from discourses between
various intertexts and from power-plays between various interest-groups (Gentzler
2002: 217; cf. Hermans 2002; Howard 2005). This paradigm highlights the com-
plex textual, cultural and political relations in the Dizdar case study. It shows, for
instance, how early-20th-century historians’ claims that an obscure heretic move-
ment was the main religion of medieval Bosnia^7 were recycled by Dizdar into a
poetic statement of national identity; how this statement was used in E’s essay; and
how this was transformed into my and T1’s translation. And it shows how the
translated essay collection constructed and transmitted images and discourses
within a complex intra-cultural and inter-cultural space – a space which, in my
narrative, was defined by a power-play for Bosnia’s cultural and physical survival.2.8.3 Beliefs, ideologies and ethics
Important sources of a poetry translator’s partisanship are her or his beliefs. Some
beliefs may have the status of ideology: a “constellation of beliefs and ideas” which
is “experienced as fundamental and commonsensical” by a certain social group
(Verschueren, cited in Calzada Pérez 2003: 5). This implies that ideologies, too,
are created, negotiated and maintained through discourse within networks. Thus
my own ideologized narrative of the Bosnian conflict was shaped, partially at
least, by international third-order discourses of opposition to ethnonationalist
war. And ideological “complicity” (Buzelin 2004: 737–738) – here, unspoken
agreement about its political motive – underlay the team members’ work on the
essay collection.
Three types of ideology appear to be particularly important in poetry transla-
tion (Jones 2006a: 193). ‘Socio-political’ ideologies are ideologies of politics- These claims are contested by more recent historians (Malcolm 1996: 27–42).