Poetry Translating as Expert Action
3.1.2.1 Bosnian, BCS and English
‘Bosnian poetry’ is defined as poetry written in BCS by poets living in or coming
from Bosnia. When defining a cultural phenomenon in place terms, however, one
should beware falling into the ontopological trap (p. 20) of assuming that culture
within that place is always different from culture outside it. Thus Bosnian poetry
shares traditions of form and content spanning the former Yugoslav region, and is
fully comprehensible to non-Bosnian BCS readers. Moreover, some poets were
born in other Yugoslav republike but settled in Bosnia, or vice versa. And since the
war, poets and poetry translators number among the many people from Bosnia
now living in other ex-Yugoslav states or the wider world^1. For the purposes of
this survey, all are regarded as ‘Bosnian’. Here, of course, I am using external crite-
ria. Self-identifications may differ: the poets and translators surveyed, for example,
may call themselves ‘Bosnian’, ‘Bosniak’, ‘Croatian’ or ‘Serbian’, or even ‘Bosnian-
Canadian’. As explained earlier, however, calling oneself ‘Bosnian’ implies alle-
giance to a unitary Bosnian state – and I wanted the survey also to include people
from Bosnia who feel no such allegiance.
As for language, BCS was the main language of about 16–17 million people in
1992, of whom about 4.3 million lived in Bosnia.^2 It had, and has, few non-native
users outside the ex-Yugoslav region. English, by contrast, is the main language of
about 350 million people, including those of an economic and cultural super-
power, and is the world’s most important non-native language (Graddol 2003:
156–159). Translation in English, therefore, can give a large, world-wide audience
access to Bosnian poetry. It can also internationalize the concept of source culture
espoused by Bosnian-poetry project teams. These potentials, however, are re-
stricted by the fact that translations form a lower proportion of publications in
English than in virtually any other major language. In the survey period (1992–
2008), translations made up only 2–4% of USA and UK book publications, though
smaller presses published slightly more (Venuti 1995: 1–11; Keeley 2000: 45; Hale
2009: 217).3.1.2.2 Culture wars and a ‘post-’ peace
Relationships between territory, identity and culture have recently been fiercely
debated within Bosnia, especially in the years around the 1992–1995 military con-
flict. The most obvious of these ‘culture wars’ was fought between the three eth-
nonationalist ideologies. There are few linguistic and no physical markers of dif-
ference between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, though personal names often differ.
Hence culture was crucial in constructing differences between narodi. Once- Estimates vary from 0.5 to 1.3 million (Kent 2006: 454, 467).
- Based on 1991 census data (Woodward 1995: 32; Walsh 2001: 57).