Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
however, reflected the cosmopolitanist affirmation of Bosnian identity (which
sometimes also had a civic-political nationalist element) or wider sense of place
signalled by their teams’ positionality. The pan-Yugoslav make-up of
Kambasković-Sawers’ team (2005), for instance, was reflected in the titles of her
web-page (Six Poems from Balkan Homes) and journal issue (Home and Home-
coming), which signal pan-Balkan identity and non-nationalist concepts of geo-
graphical rootedness.
Reviews have a significantly different key-theme profile to projects^11. The main
differences occur in three of Figure 13’s groupings^12. Firstly, reviews signalled war
much more often than projects: 52% (25/48) vs. 28% of tags respectively. Con-
versely, reviews were less likely to signal no prominent theme or simply present
poets (misc + poet): 8% (4/48) vs. 23% of tags. Thirdly, reviews were less likely to
signal Bosnian identity plus wider place: 2% (1/48) vs. 11%.
So why this imbalance? Firstly, war-themed projects attracted dispropor-
tionally more reviews. All four Goran Simić projects reviewed plus
Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues (Figure 12), for example, featured the Bosnian
war: these alone accounted for 56% (27/48) of all reviews found. Secondly, with
projects featuring war plus other themes, reviews often focused solely on war.
Scar on the Stone, for example, was tagged with war, cultural memory and place,
but four of its eight reviews only mentioned war. As with projects, this promi-
nence is lessening over time: 86% (6/7) of reviews dated 1992–2000 mentioned
war, versus 45% (13/29) of reviews dated 2001–2008. The latter figure (45%),
however, still contrasts sharply with the 23% of war-tagged translation projects
over the same period..
Reviewers, therefore, still hold, and therefore still promote, an early-1990s
image of Bosnian poetry as war reportage (cf. Jones and Arsenijević 2005: 83).
Conversely, they under-report the growth in less dramatic or non-Bosnia-specific
concerns, such as the use of poetry translation to negotiate local identities, or to
communicate local poetry as simply poetry.3.3.4.4 Images of translating
In order to explore how reviewers view the contribution of translators to their
reading experience, reviews were also tagged as to whether they mentioned
translation (plus translators, translating, etc.) – and if so, what opinions were
expressed.- Total χ^2 12.2 at 4 d.f., p 0.02.
- Accounting for 4.3, 3.6 and 3.2 of total χ^2 respectively.