Poetry Translating as Expert Action
players in the survey were in fact located in the hybrid space of diaspora. Here,
ever-strengthening networks in the host country, where they live and work, coexist
with an undiminished allegiance towards kod nas, ‘back home’ – a double web of
networks that arguably makes diaspora players crucial to many translation projects
(Werbner 2002: 120; Jones 2009). Some non-Bosnian players could also be seen as
hybrid actors: Agee, for instance, was a USA-born poet living in Ireland.
Secondly, actors may feel allegiance to other spaces than those of birth or res-
idence. For Agee, the impetus to Scar on the Stone was his emotional and intellec-
tual identification with post-war Bosnia. He writes of his first visit to Sarajevo:
“profound, moving, unforgettable, it was one of the most significant and happy
moments of my life” (1998a: 15).
Most projects surveyed, in fact – even single-poet projects – have the space
features of Scar on the Stone: players’ origins and actions distributed across multi-
ple spaces, linked by e-mail plus (to a lesser extent) postal and phone communica-
tion. Typical also is a strong allegiance by key Anglo players (editors or translators)
towards Bosnia and Bosnian culture. Bosnian and other BCS actors in Anglo-
country diaspora often play key roles: indeed, the 1996–2006 survey reported that
disproportionally many translation projects featured diaspora rather than Bosnia-
based Bosnian poets, especially in North America (Jones 2009: 309–310). This
tendency has increased in the present survey. It also means, however, that increas-
ingly many single-living-poet teams (poet, translator and publisher) are largely or
wholly sited in North America (e.g. Mehmedinović 2003; Simić 2005; Skenderija
2008): hybrid positionality of players, therefore, does not guarantee distributed
positionality of team action.
Some elements of a player’s geographic positionality, especially birthplace, are
important for personal identity. In any country, discourses of identity are typically
ideologized and often ontopological – that is, formulated as taken-for-granted
concepts that are often sited in geographic space. This was especially so in Bosnia
over the survey period, whether the discourses stressed ethnonationalist or civic-
political nationalist ontopologies – rooting identity in the narod or the Bosnian
state respectively – or whether they resisted nationalist ontopologies. Hence it is
worth examining the stance of poetry translation teams towards these discourses.
As most projects’ paratexts write about source poets, paratextual references to
poet positionality can provide strong clues to the team’s ideologies of identity.
Hence references to place of birth (e.g. Sarajevo or Bosnia-Herzegovina), identity
labels (e.g. Bosnian poet) and language terms (e.g. translated from Serbo-Croatian)
were logged for the 54 translation projects where introductions, book covers, pub-
lisher blurbs, etc. were available. Of these, most revealed a civic-political or non-
nationalist stance: 40 identified the source poet or language as Bosnian or from
Bosnia[-Herzegovina], six used the ex-Yugoslav label Serbo-Croat[ian] for the