Poetry Translating as Expert Action
attempt to influence readers’ perceptions in this respect – by positioning translated
poems as ‘modern-day sonnets’ or ‘war poetry’, say.
Systems of translated poems are most often centred in the receptor country;
here, as with Goran Simić’s poetry in Canada, or with Ted Hughes’s translations in
the UK, they may even become interlinked with non-translated systems. Some sys-
tems, however, are centred in the source country. Thus the 1999 Sarajevo-published
Kameni spavač/Stone Sleeper, for example, entered the Bosnia-based system of Mak
Dizdar publications. Casanova also sees translated literary works as potentially en-
tering a “world literary field”: an international textual system that extends beyond
one cultural space (2002/2010). Here, being translated into English, a globalized
language, makes it more likely that a work can enter this world literary field.
Within a system or sub-system (poetry in Canada or translated Bosnian po-
etry in Canada, say), there may be power differences between projects. Some
projects may attract more reviews and readers than others, giving the team more
cultural, symbolic and economic capital. Hence key team members, like the editor
or publisher, may try to increase reader numbers by exploiting the existing capital
of team members (prominent translator-poets like Hughes, say), or by gearing the
project to reader expectations (of Bosnia as ‘war-torn’ even in the 2000s, say).
Different sub-systems and sub-fields also enjoy different levels of support
within wider society. The Kouwenaar translation workshop, for instance, was
made possible by Netherlands state funding – part of a subvention system for liter-
ary translation that does not exist in poorer source countries like Bosnia.7.5.3 Cultures and sub-cultures
At one level, the poetry translators surveyed here appear to write within and for a
certain culture, in the sense of a set of values, social processes and textual systems
shared by a third-level imagined community – ‘English-language poetry’, for ex-
ample. The Kouwenaar translators’ decisions, for example, may be seen as assum-
ing that they and their audience belong to such a community of values, processes
and texts. Poetry translations, however, may also be produced and used within
‘sub-cultures’: smaller imagined communities with values, processes and texts that
may set them apart from other sub-cultures. The producers and intended readers
of the web journal Spirit of Bosnia, for example, may be seen as belonging to an
imagined sub-community defined by its belief in Bosnia’s cultural unity. Hence it
is best also to see the models of intercultural mediation described in Chapter 2 –
intercultural power-play, intercultural ambassadorship, and glocalized hybridity- as often mediating between sub-cultures.
The culture/sub-culture division is not rigid, however. Imagined communities
have a variety of sizes and inter-relationships. Smaller imagined communities