Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
‘1st-co-translator,’ Antonela Glavinić, who made English literals (6a). She for-
warded these to ten ‘2nd-co-translators’, all native-English-writing poets (including
the editor) selected by the editor because of their affinity with each source poet;
they rewrote the literals into poetic versions (6b). All final versions were sent to
the editor (7). He assembled the text complex, adding some previously-published
prose extracts, and his own Introduction and Acknowledgments. He then sent it
to the publisher (8), who – along with others not shown in Figure 6, such as the
cover designer and printer – published it as a paper book (9).
In their main, poem-rewriting role, therefore, translators within multi-poet
projects interact primarily with the editor and with poetic texts (5–7, Figure 6).
Co-translating partnerships may also happen, because there are too few source →
receptor poetry translators, and/or because receptor-language poets as co-transla-
tors can add symbolic capital to the project.
Single-living-poet projects, which feature only a single, living Bosnian poet,
tend to be more simply structured. Here, the poet usually takes the editor role,
which implies maintaining contacts with a publisher and recruiting a translator or
translators (e.g. Mehmedinović 1998; Skenderija 2008; cf. Jones 2009: 314–316).
Single-dead-poet projects feature only a single non-living Bosnian poet. Here,
the source poem or poems inspire the network’s formation, as with the bilingual
Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper (Dizdar 1973/1999; cf. Jones 2009: 311–314). Here
the translator, or a translator + editor partnership, plays the central organizing role- contacting a publisher or journal editor, for instance, and producing paratexts
(introduction and notes).
Informal web publishing has the simplest pattern. Here, a translated poem or
poems inspires a publisher to post it on the internet; typically, source poet and
translator hardly participate. Pittard (2005), for example, posted two poems from
Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues (1998) on a poetry blog. The blog does not reveal,
however, whether Mehmedinović or his translator Alcalay were involved or even
gave permission for the posting.
3.3.2.2 Actors, roles and power
Actors, including translators, may sometimes combine translating with other
roles. They may also write paratexts. Or they may also edit, as when the Scar on the
Stone editor co-translated some poems, or when its translators (including myself )
acted as poem reviewers. With the survey’s folk poetry collections (taken from
recordings gathered in the 1930s and 1940s: Bynum 1993, Vidan 2003, Bajgorić
and Foley 2004), editor and translator roles were merged. In each case, one person
selected the texts, made a BCS transcript, added English translations, and wrote a
critical introduction, notes, plus other paratextual materials.