Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
source language, and four used neutral terms (e.g. Sarajevo poet). Another four
had no space marker. No projects, however, identified poets as simply Bosniak,
Croat[ian] or Serb[ian], which stress ethnonational identity whilst ignoring
Bosnian location or statehood; and none used the ‘semi-ethnonationalist’ labels
Bosnian Croat/Muslim/Serb, which combine location with nationhood.
Many paratexts also involved statements by an editor, translator or source
poet. These took one of three positions. The first was explicitly cosmopolitanist
and anti-ethnonationalist, as with the web journal Spirit of Bosnia (Doubt 2006):
One over-looked casualty of the war in Bosnia is her collective commitment to
a pluralistic, tolerant, integrated society. [...] [The] mission of this journal is to
redress this problem as incisively as it can.The second was implicitly cosmopolitanist – as in translator-editor Mario Suško’s in-
troduction to Contemporary Poetry of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he writes about
modern Bosnian poetry whilst citing poets from all three narodi (1993). A civic-po-
litical Bosnian nationalism, as implied by Doubt’s personification of Bosnia as her,
occasionally underlay the first two positions. The third position revealed no clear
ideological stance – simply presenting, for instance, the source poet’s biography.
A team’s attitude to ethnonationalist ideologies might also be reflected in its
make-up. Hence the names of all Bosnian players were examined to see if they
were of Bosniak, Croatian or Serbian origin. The narod mix of larger teams was
roughly in proportion to the Bosnian republika’s 1991 make-up. Though some
smaller teams appeared mono-national, this was not true of all teams, so it is prob-
ably a random effect. Most teams, therefore, involved inter-narod cooperation,
thus implicitly rejecting ethnonationalist ideologies that rooted identity in alle-
giance to one narod.
Moreover, several teams continued the Yugoslav tradition of inter-republika
cooperation. Serbian-Australian translator Danijela Kambasković-Sawers (2005),
for example, contributed English translations of poems by three Bosnian poets,
herself and a Montenegrin poet to an issue of the web journal Gangway, edited by
Tatjana Lukić, a Croatian-Bosnian writer resident in Australia. This project, in
other words, involved cosmopolitanist cooperation across a virtual ex-Yugoslav
space, which existed in actors’ life histories and was enacted in links between di-
aspora and Bosnia-based actors.
Thus, in terms of how they represented their project to readers, and/or their
team make-up, teams took three positions regarding identity and space. Some
stressed Bosnian civic-political identity, whereas others took a non-ontopological
view of spatial identity, though both views were based on cosmopolitanist princi-
ples. A third group took no clear position. No teams, however, showed evidence of
supporting ethnonationalist models of identity.