Chapter 2. Poetry in a political preface
proper, gender, sexuality, etc. Here, the Dizdar extract explicitly supported the col-
lection’s political motive. ‘Aesthetic ideologies’ are beliefs about literary communi-
cation – my belief that poetry translations should reflect the source poet’s style, for
instance. These are closely linked to translation norms; and, by informing con-
cepts of good practice, they underlie professional ethics. Thirdly, ‘intercultural
ideologies’ are beliefs about source-receptor culture relations – my working view
of the translator as inter-cultural mediator, for example.
Of the three paradigms mentioned earlier, ‘inter-community power-play’
gives the translator a choice between two socio-political positions: supporting
source-culture or receptor-culture ideologies. ‘Intercultural ambassadorship’ fo-
cuses on aesthetic and intercultural ideologies. ‘Glocalized hybridity’ implies a
wide range of potential ideological types and positions: poetry translators, for in-
stance, might support ideologies present in both source and receptor community,
or take an ideological position belonging to neither. Moreover, a culture is not a
unitary concept, but a heterogeneous cluster of “diverse” and “competing view-
points, discourses and textures” (Tymoczko 2003: 200). Thus the translated essay
collection not only aimed to reinforce the ideological solidarity between cosmo-
politanist interest networks spanning Bosnia and the West, but also opposed the
ideologies of other interest networks, such as ethnonationalisms within the source
community.
Most ideology-based analyses of translation focus on the translator’s action –
though, as we have seen, the essay collection’s ideology was a team responsibility.
They also most often use evidence from output style (the “part of a source text’s
meanings” mentioned earlier): “what the translator has added, what [s/]he has left
out, the words [s/]he has chosen, and how [s/]he has placed them” (Álvarez and
Vidal 1996: 5). In the Dizdar extract, my socio-political ideology might have left
textual traces. For example, changing the literal secretly like a skilful spy from the
We s t into the more pejorative secret and sly as a Western spy might have been mo-
tivated not only by the sly-spy rhyme, but also by a wish to portray official Western
policy towards Bosnia as hypocritical. Ideologically more important, however,
seems to have been the “part of a source culture’s texts” decision: my editing E’s
essay collection rather than a Serbian ethnonationalist document, say.
Ethics, paraphrasing the Oxford English Dictionary, may be seen as an ideol-
ogy of “human duty”; in practice, it involves making emotional-cognitive judge-
ments about interpersonal relations. Ethical considerations often underlie norms
within a field: thus an ethic of loyalty to the source poet underlies the translator’s
norm of reliably representing source-text semantics where possible, which I tried
to follow in the Dizdar extract. At third-order level, the translator’s responsibility
to source and receptor cultures may be seen in ethical terms (Pym 1997). Ethics
may also be socio-political: the ethics of political commitment or social justice, for