Translating Spiritual Space-Time Recreating Kameni Spavacˇ in English

5Appendix Translating Spiritual Space-Time Recreating Kameni Spavacˇ In English Francis R. Jones ny act of literary translation does more than reshape an original A(“source”) text into a “target” text in another language: It also medi- ates between source and target writer, source and target reader, source and target culture. In this essay I describe how, as the English translator of Ka- meni spavac, I attempted to reshape and mediate Dizdar’s world in the light of my own relationships with Bosnia, with Dizdar’s text, and with my mother tongue. Borderlands Let me start by charting the outer lines of these relationships. In the late 1970s I, a young Englishman with an accent from a Yorkshire industrial town and a Cambridge degree in Serbo-Croat, was a postgraduate student of poetry in Sarajevo. There, I became spellbound by Dizdar’s numinous verse. But why did Dizdar seize me so? The answer parallels that to another 166 Stone Speaker question: Why study in Sarajevo, rather than the bigger centers of Belgrade or Zagreb? Some things cannot be explained that easily, especially now that history’s seismic shifts have savagely, irrevocably changed the physical and cultural landscape of what once was Yugoslavia, and my feelings toward it. I have tried to write out these feelings elsewhere.1 Here, suffice it to say this: What attracted me both to Bosnia and to Dizdar was an intense and heady beauty, but also a sense that I was in the borderlands, the marches of my world until then. What I glimpsed was indeed beautiful—the serene yellow leaves of an autumn lime tree in a mosque courtyard, for instance, or a unique poetry whose rhythm and images had the rush of strong rakija. But the beauty had a double—edged frisson: History lay close to the surface, and wisdom, even then, had often been bought at a terrible cost. Whatever—I resolved to translate Kameni spavac into Stone Sleeper. Mounting my own expeditions into the shadowy worlds Dizdar had trav- elled, mapped, and so intensely felt, I spent many days in Sarajevo’s Na- tional Library, reading Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian verse, heretical and antiheretical tracts, and tomes of nineteenth-century folklore. But the book took 20 years to complete. Still only a novice translator, I found that reproducing Dizdar’s dazzling form was initially beyond me: indeed, the course of my apprenticeship can be traced through the pages of the final work. And without a publisher or a living poet pressing me to find one, Stone Sleeper was a slow-burning, private passion. A bilingual edition fi- nally appeared in Sarajevo in 1999, but Stone Sleeper has not yet been pub- lished in an English-speaking country. What the Translator Does: Models of Translation Before starting the analysis proper, it is worth referring to the translation- theory assumptions on which it is based. The work of the literary translator can be viewed from various standpoints. One is the familiar, faithful, free cline, which might be better described as a cline oriented between source text and target text respectively. Here, I see the literary translator as looking both ways—as a demiurge whom the source writer has entrusted to create a new world, but who rebels against the source writer at the translator’s own peril. The translator as Sataniel, perhaps. Another cline is that between orientation toward translation as prod- uct—that is, words on paper, and toward translation as process, that is, the translator’s mental and physical acts. Here, I start from a process base, describing how and why—while translating—I identified certain key translation problems (for example, that stedak has no English equivalent) appendix 167 and weighed up possible strategies (to use an endnote and/or to keep the original Bosnian word).2 This, however, inevitably leads to an evaluation of the target-text products (such as the line of verse) that resulted. A third aspect is that of the translator as an actor in a communicative process. As I describe elsewhere, the literary translator has a double task, that of alchemist and that of ambassador.3 As alchemist, one has to phys- ically make a new text, melting down the metal of the source in order to refashion it in a different but ideally no less precious metal—that is, that of the target language. With such a complex, multi-layered text as Kameni spavac, this is not easy; indeed, Bosnians and Herzegovinans pride them- selves on the untranslatability of their master poet. As an ambassador, one has to persuade readers in the target culture to read and hear a new voice from an unfamiliar culture. When translating into English a poet deeply rooted in a cultural soil largely unknown to an English-reading public, this is no less a challenge. Moreover, both ambassadorship and alchemy have an ideological di- mension. With ambassadorship, ideology informs the translator’s decision to translate, or to refuse a writer’s or publisher’s request for translation. In my case, the decision to translate and promote Dizdar’s work was initially an artistic one (I felt that he was, quite simply, a great poet). But later, during the savage dismemberment of Bosnia in the 1990s, it also became a political decision—an urge to represent to the outside world a culture that I saw being threatened with deliberate extinction. As for alchemy, the fact that no two languages and cultures map exactly onto one another makes perfect reproduction impossible. Within this space of imperfection, translators have to make choices. These choices are shaped not only by linguistic and stylistic concerns, but also by ideological con- cerns4: How do translators choose to portray, in their target text, the source writer and the culture of he or she writes? How is this portrayal colored by their own worldview and the expectations they ascribe to their target readers? Thus, in my translation, choices that were seemingly just linguistic and artistic were also coloured by my own passion for Dizdar’s poetry, his culture, and his country. Translating the Local In Kameni spavac, the universal and mythic is reached by way of the local and real. But whereas the universal is what makes his work worth translating, the local makes it difficult to translate—for the translator into En- glish has to recreate Dizdar’s world in a language whose culture lacks many of the raw materials to do that job. This, of course, is a challenge 168 Stone Speaker central to the philosophy of translation, and of communication in gen- eral: How can art intensely based in locality be communicated to those who are alien to that locality?5 This theme runs through the discussions that follow. Geography When describing a locality, it is usual to begin with the physical. The readers of Kameni spavac—natives of Yugoslavia and its successor states, or non-natives who have learned the language once known as Serbo- Croat—are familiar with the physical feel of Bosnia and the surrounding region. But relatively few native English readers of Stone Sleeper will have visited the region, or will be familiar with its geography, topography, peo- ple, and artifacts—at least beyond the television newsreels, which, thank- fully, are now too receding into history. Nevertheless, physical geography itself only rarely presented translation problems. The very familiarity of the landscape means that it is only rarely described or alluded to in Kameni spavac, and the world that Dizdar (re)creates is far more a Tamni vilajet, a Dark Province of myth, than a physical reality. Only sometimes—for example, when specific towns, rivers, and the like, are named—does physical geography muscle to the fore. Here I used the strategy of explanatory notes only as a last resort, preferring where possible to solve the problem within the text itself. This was not always easy, as shown in the following lines from the poem “Svatovska/Wedding” show (literal version appended): I za zedne pute (And for the thirsty roads Jer pravo od travnicke Lasve Because straight from the Travnik Lasva Pa preko Rame i Neretve And across the Rama and Neretva Do travunjske Lastve To Travunian Lastva Lete te laste Those swallows fly Na Lastovo Onto Lastovo Plavo The blue Readers of the original would know that Travnik and Lastva are Bosnian towns; that the Rama, Neretva, and Lasva are Bosnian rivers; that Lastovo is an Adriatic island; and perhaps also that Travunje was a medieval Bosn- ian province. Moreover, they would realize that Dizdar is highlighting the etymological link between laste (“swallows”) and Lasva, Lastva, and Las- tovo. In English, by contrast, a mere transcription of names would convey appendix 169 neither the physical representation nor the etymology to target-text readers. My strategy, therefore, was one of deliberate “explicitation” (making assumed information in the source into explicitly stated information in the target6), both of the key place-names and of the etymology: For Bosnia’s thirsty roads Because these swallows are swooping Across all her rivers from Swiftwater Lasva Over the Rama and Neretva To Lastva the Swallow Above blue Lastovo Isle of Swallows Note here the signalling role of Bosnia’s (my addition) in the first line, the dropping (for poetic streamlining purposes) of the modifiers Travnik and Travunian, and the glossing of the last two names (Lastva the Swallow and Lastovo Isle of Swallows). An alternative, explored in an early draft, might have been to favor the word play and delicate sound structure at the ex- pense of greater geographical precision: Because these swallows are swooping Swift across her rivers over the Swiftwater Over the Rama and Neretva As far as Swallowfield And the blue Isle of Swallows However, such a radical act of “domestication,” that is, of adaptation toward target-language norms7, would have made my locality more mythic and less Bosnian.

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