Poetry Translating as Expert Action
CROATIA
(19 91)
SLOVENIA
(19 91)
BOSNIA &
HERZEGOVINA
(19 92)
MACEDONIA
(19 93)
Belgrade
SERBIA
(2006)
Podgorica
Sarajevo
Zagreb
Ljubljana
Skopje
1995 partition of Bosnia & Herzegovina
Republika Srpska
Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
( ): year of independence
[ ]: independence recognized by minority
of UN members only
Priština
[KOSOVO]
(2008)
MONTE-
NEGRO
(2006)
Figure 1. The Yugoslav successor states in 2010: Sketch map
2.2 Context: Poetry and political prose
Before using it to model poetry translating, the case study needs putting in con-
text. In the late 1970s, while Yugoslavia was still a single-party Communist state
under the relatively liberal rule of the aging President Tito, I was an exchange stu-
dent in Sarajevo, capital of the Bosnian republika. I then started translating poetry,
most of it by Bosnian and Serbian poets.
I also became captivated by the Bosnian stećci^1 , medieval tombstones carved
with enigmatic symbols – crosses and crescents, dragons and dancers, a soldier
with a vast upraised right hand and a sun for a head: see Figure 2 and Bihalji-Merin
et al. (1963). The then widely-believed interpretation for these symbols captivated
me even more. This held that the medieval Bosnian kingdom had adopted as its
main religion the Bogomil heresy, a radical Christian sect that saw the earth and
- The nominative singular form is stećak.