Poetry Translating as Expert Action
The status of human subjects and culture, as the familiar shattered under the eyes
of globalized media, was also debated during the war years. Since the war, this
‘post-’ constellation of themes has, in my view, come to dominate cultural debate
and new poetry in Bosnia, as in the work of Faruk Šehić:
I live on the other side of all things
beside Saturn’s ring
on the Paradise Islands in amber houses
the last century prematurely aged us
already we are a hundred years old
[...]
where god weeps with sagging shoulders
and where there is no space for human life
Christ is a lucrative mass-produced doll
and nightingales are roasted on the grills of McDonald’s.
(2007, tr. Sara Elaqad)Here, the certainties of modern life have fragmented into postmodern uncer-
tainties. The once-trusted models of society – communism, ethnonationalism,
and a democracy that entrenches ethnonationalist political dominance – have
proved equally unreliable. Though nominally a unitary state, much of Bosnia
consists of ethnicized fiefdoms, where wartime wounds are slow to heal. Rooted-
ness in local space (as in Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper) has given way to mental disloca-
tion, life in diaspora, or both. Local cultures compete with a Babel of globalized
voices, where English-language cultures shout the loudest. This condition,
however, can also offer global interconnectedness between like-minded people
rather than narrow provincialism, plus new, less rigid, multiple modes of iden-
tity – post-ethnonationalist, post-patriarchal and post-heterosexist, for instance
(Arsenijević 2007).3.2 Methods: Surveying Bosnian poetry translation
The survey, run at the end of 2008, aimed to log as many as possible Bosnian-to-
English poetry translation projects published since 1992, in both paper and web
form, plus as many as possible of their reviews. It expands on two earlier surveys
of Bosnian poetry in English translation covering the periods 1992–2005 and
1996–2006 respectively (Jones and Arsenijević 2005; Jones 2009).
A translation project is defined as a book, journal issue or website featuring
one or more poems by one or more Bosnian poets in English translation. A review
is defined as an English text written about all or part of a project by a non-team
member. Four resources were searched: the world-wide web, via Google and