Poetry Translating as Expert Action
ethnonationalist government in provoking war and human rights abuses), and
some promoted a Serbian ethnonationalist stance. With this last group, poetry
translation (postings of translated folk epics on an international white-suprema-
cist web forum, for example) highlighted cultural links between the source-culture
Self and the receptor-culture Other, but in order to exclude third Others – source
and target-language users imagined as ethnonationally alien to the project’s team
and implied readers. No such teams, however, had non-Serbian members. To some
extent, therefore, the Bosnian findings probably reflect how translation and inter-
national reception of Bosnian poetry was affected by transnational alliances op-
posing ethnonationalist war during the 1990s. From both surveys, however, one
may speculate that transnational poetry-translation teams which promote opposi-
tion to a third Other could well be rare.3.4.5.2 Images of the source culture
The poetry of wartime witness and protest is inevitably prominent in the Bosnian
survey, which spanned a vicious war and its aftermath. Its 1992–2005 predecessor,
however, reported that this poetry featured more in translation projects published
outside than within former Yugoslavia (Jones and Arsenijević 2005: 82). This im-
plies that target-country publishers, who produced most projects overall, may well
have disproportionally favoured war-themed projects. This bias was not only due
to the agency of target-country natives, however. The translated works of Goran
Simić, for example, were dominated even during the 2000s by the theme of war-
time witness. He was also the most-translated poet in the survey, with enough
projects (12/59) to influence its overall profile; and as most of these were single-
living-poet publications, he was their lead actor. His still favouring war themes
might be linked to his location in target-country diaspora, with the very strength
of his literary networking there making him more likely to write according to tar-
get-country schemata of the source culture. Nevertheless, other Bosnian poets in
North America showed more of a progression from war to ‘post-’ themes, indicat-
ing that diaspora poets need not necessarily reflect host-country above source-
country self-images.
The present survey showed the war emphasis in translation projects to be less-
ening over time, though less fast than in original poetry. This suggests that the
images signalled in poetry translation roughly reflect those in original work, but
with a time-lag between the two – some of which results inevitably from the time-
lag between initiating and publishing a project. In reviews, however, the war em-
phasis was even stronger than in translations, and appeared to be lessening even
more slowly. Thus, even 5–13 years after the war, the ‘war-torn Bosnia’ schema
remained powerful or dramatically appealing enough to condition which projects
reviewers chose to read, or to resist being changed by the multiple signals in the