Poetry Translating as Expert Action
At first sight, this chapter’s findings might appear specific to Bosnian poetry in
English. Most, however, can be generalized to other settings. Like BCS, most
source languages are non-globalized, with relatively few non-native users. All
source states have mutually-opposed interest-groups, most have tensions between
different imagined communities, and not a few are marked by ongoing or recent
armed conflict. Moreover, many poetry translations are published in globalized
languages like English, Spanish, Arabic or Chinese. This chapter, therefore, illus-
trates the common world phenomenon of a relatively small network of translators
working with other players to transmit local poetry to an international audience,
and how this action can highlight wider issues of cultural politics and cultural
representation across languages.3.3 Findings: Projects, teams, career webs and reviews
This section first outlines the publishing context by summarizing the different
types of poetry translation projects. It then focuses, in turn, on: translating teams;
the second-order ‘career webs’ linking translators across projects and with their
peers; and how translation reviews can signal not only what translated poetry gets
read, but also issues of cross-cultural power and representation.3.3.1 Poetry translation projects
The survey shows the sheer variety of poetry-translation project types and trans-
mission means around the turn of the 21st century.
Paper translations took the form of single-poet books (e.g. Dizdar’s 1999 Ka-
meni spavač/Stone Sleeper), plus multi-poet anthologies and journal issues. Some
multi-poet publications sometimes featured only Bosnian poets (e.g. Agee’s Scar
on the Stone: 1998b), and some also featured other BCS poets, English-language
poets, and/or poets from other countries. Occasionally, as with Scar on the Stone
or the anti-nationalist campaign book Why Bosnia? (Ali and Lifschutz 1993), po-
ems were accompanied by prose fiction or reportage.
On-line translations had an even wider variety of formats than in earlier sur-
veys, showing the expanding possibilities of web publishing. Translated Bosnian
poems appeared in on-line journals, on a university visiting writers’ website, a
poetry festival archive, and on poets’ own websites (e.g. Kambasković-Sawers
2005; Sijarić 2003; Vešović 2001; Simić 2003). They were also broadcast as stream-
ing-audio readings, posted in blogs, or quoted in literary essays (e.g. Pittard 2005;
Simić and Rickman year unknown; 2006).