Poetry Translating as Expert Action
They appeared on newspaper sites, web journals and web extracts from paper
journals, a writer’s website (Kellar Bell 2006), and a reader’s blog (Wells 2007).
Booksellers’ websites often posted professional writers’ or customers’ reviews:
these were not always positive (e.g. Telalović 2000), and therefore seemed genu-
inely independent. Web essays citing whole poems combined the role of review
and translation publication (e.g. Arsenijević 2006).
Some web reviews had an earlier paper existence, as with on-line editions of
paper journals. Most, however, did not, or they showed a radical change of func-
tion – as when paper book-trade reviews were used as promotional material on
publishers’ websites. Hence, unlike with translations, neither paper nor on-line
reviews seemed primary: rather, both usually functioned autonomously.3.3.4.2 Which projects get reviewed?
After publication, a project text becomes the main actor in its interest network.
Hence it potentially has power – power to recruit readers, but also symbolic or
cultural capital. Both may depend on the power of certain readers – especially
those with high social and cultural capital, such as reviewers for leading literary
journals – to recruit other readers or bestow capital on the project text.
So which poetry translations attract reviewers? Figure 12 lists the 16 projects
(out of 59) with identified reviews, plus review counts. All these projects were pa-
per- rather than web-published, confirming paper’s higher status. All but three
projects reviewed – the Bosnia-published Stone Sleeper and A Blindman Sings to
His City (Dizdar 1973/1999; Sidran 1997), and the India-published Life Revisited
(Suško 2006) – were published in the UK or North America. Moreover, most re-
views (34/43, or 79%) concerned three poets living in North American diaspora:
Semezdin Mehmedinović, Goran Simić and Saša Skenderija.
Reviewers’ names and site titles suggest that all but two or three of the re-
views were produced by Anglo writers in Anglo countries. A project’s power to
recruit reviewers, therefore, depended partially on distribution networks: if it was
unavailable in Anglo countries, it attracted few reviews. No reviews were found
for Suško’s Contemporary Poetry of Bosnia and Herzegovina (published 1993, in
wartime Sarajevo), for example, although it was as ambitious and definitive as the
UK-published Scar on the Stone, which attracted eight reviews. But as reviewers
were often published poets, it probably also depended on whether reviewers and
project players – especially poets like Simić, but also translators like Browne –
participated in the same Anglo-country networks of literary production and
communication.