Chapter 3. Poetry translation webs
3.4.5 Ideologies, identities and imagined communities
3.4.5.1 Partiality
The survey’s background highlighted how a source region can contain imagined
communities and interest-groups which differ radically in terms of socio-political
ideology and identity. The survey itself showed how transnational cultural action
via poetry translation can both engage in conflict between interest groups and of-
fer a possible reconciliation to social conflict. Thus what linked players in many
teams was allegiance to a cosmopolitanist sense of cultural community, which var-
ied in scope between the local (Bosnia-based) and the regional (a BCS-speaking or
Balkan space). This was shown in cosmopolitanist project aims, in the mixed iden-
tit ies of many teams’ South Slav members, and in the absence of projects showing
ethnonationalist ideologies, whether these claimed existential incompatibility be-
tween nations or one nation’s superiority. In a source region marked by cultural,
political and physical conflict about the very existence of a shared culture, these
teams were implicitly or deliberately taking an anti-ethnonationalist side in this
conflict. Nevertheless, their very line of attack, which stressed how different iden-
tit ies could co-exist, promoted a space for the conflict’s reconciliation.
This reflects how, in Tymoczko’s words, the double partiality of literary trans-
lators (both selecting text and taking sides) enables them to “participate in the
dialectic of power, the ongoing process of political discourse, and strategies for
social change” (2000: 24). Strictly speaking, partiality applies to poetry translation
teams. However, at least some partial actions fall to translators. Translators can
choose whether or not to enter another lead actor’s project, or may promote a
project of their own choosing. During a project, they may be involved in selecting
poets and poems, in writing paratexts or suggesting publication titles – all of which
may show socio-political partiality. Socio-political partiality might also be shown
in how they translate text: an issue addressed in Chapter 6.
For this survey’s teams, participating in this “dialectic of power” was (in my
view, at least) socially positive. Undertaking a poetry translation project probably
implies believing that boundaries between the Self and Other are permeable, so that
the translated-into Self (or Other, depending on the actor’s positionality) benefits
from the translated-from Other (or Self ). This survey’s teams, however, also pro-
moted social justice by refusing to exclude the ‘third Other’ (Lévinas, in Campbell
1998: 1771–1179) – here, the different person within the source community.
A translation team’s partiality, however, may also mean colluding in oppres-
sion, or in asserting a “tribal” us-identity (Baker 2006b: 114, passim; Maalouf, in
House et al. 2005: 12). The parallel Serbian survey confirmed this (Jones 2010).
Though some Serbian poetry translation projects took a cosmopolitanist stance,
most ignored the socio-political context (thus ignoring the role of Serbia’s 1990s