Poetry Translating as Expert Action
models of post-Yugoslav society, for instance. Both ideologies merged in the cos-
mopolitanist view that distinctions between languages or cultures are bridgeable
and potentially stimulating, rather than impermeable and threatening.
Intercultural and socio-political ideologies were also revealed in the teams’
structure. Teams that include members with source-space, target-space and hy-
brid-space allegiances, for example, may well reflect an intercultural ideology that
all three types of actor are essential if an anthology is to transmit a valid picture of
the source poetry scene. With a source culture marked by ethnicized division,
however, as in this book’s Bosnian studies, such a structure was also seen as imply-
ing socio-political opposition to such division, as it was incompatible with pro-
moting ethnonationalist exclusivity (cf. Jones 2010).
Nevertheless, the teams surveyed in Jones (2010) and this book represent two
politically very charged source cultures: Serbia and Bosnia. Hence data on team
structure, publishing policies and reviews from a socio-politically less charged
source culture (the Netherlands, for instance) would be needed to establish how
generalizable these conclusions are.7.5.5 A translator’s identities
So far in this chapter, player identity has been seen in terms of vocational self-
image and socio-geographic allegiance. For poetry translators, both merge in the
‘bicultural’ identity mentioned by Chapter 4’s interviewees, where translators see
themselves as using their poetry-translating skills to perform the role of ‘ambas-
sador’ or ‘bridge’ between their two areas of allegiance – the source and the receptor
culture/country. Moreover, a translator’s identities are constructed and maintained
not only in translations, but also by discourses within the team: when an editor
like Agee, for example, enlists translators as source-poem reviewers, he is acknowl-
edging their identity as wider source-culture experts.
Translators also perform the identity or identities of the poet. Generally, this
involves subsuming, like a theatrical actor, their own individual identity in that of
the poet. In their target poems, the Kouwenaar translators strove to play Kou-
wenaar in English, with few discernible traces of themselves as individuals. Only
rarely is a translator’s own identity visibly signalled to the reader, as in the reiving
example discussed earlier.7.5.6 Global power
Most poetry translations in this book have the world’s most globalized language,
English, as their receptor language. The main source languages featured, however,
are non-globalized: BCS and Dutch. Hence a global power imbalance underlies