Poetry Translating as Expert Action Processes, priorities and networks

 Poetry Translating as Expert Action

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

war cultural

memory

misc + poet place +

Bosnian

identity

other key

themes

Key themes

Number of tags

Translation-project tags (n = 71)

Independent-review tags (n = 48)

Figure 13. Key-theme tags for translation projects and reviews

reviewers regarding the socio-political and literary concerns outlined earlier: eth-

nonationalist war, identity politics, and the move to more complex ‘post-’ themes

in recent Bosnian poetry.

For the 59 projects, war was the most prominent key theme, at 28% (20/71) of

project tags: see Figure 13. Unsurprisingly, war-themed projects were especially

prominent during and just after the 1992–1995 war, accounting for 53% (10/19) of

projects dated 1992–2000, but just 23% (9/40) of projects dated 2001–2008. The

theme of war witness and protest still persists in recent projects, such as those

featuring Goran Simić (like From Sarajevo With Sorrow, 2005). Its dominance,

however, is lessening as translation projects increasingly present a diverse range of

‘post-’ themes. These are grouped in Figure 13 under misc(ellaneous), or under

other key themes (diaspora countr y, exile, postmodern, history, translating, language,

tolerance and politics).

The second most frequent single key theme of translation projects was cul-

tural memory (21% of tags, or 15/71). This engaged with or helped (re)construct

cultural tradition – as with Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper, or the folk-poetry collec-

tions. Though cultural tradition is central to nationalist constructs of identity,

allegiance here was always to place per se (Bosnia as a region in Dizdar’s work,

for instance), not to a narod or state. Several project tags (11%, or 8/71),