The Poet and the Ambassador:

Communicating Mak Dizdar's

Stone Sleeper
Francis R. Jones

Mak Dizdar (1917-1971) came to prominence in the Yugoslavia of the

1950s. Along with poets such as Vasko Popa, Ivan V. Lalic, and Slavko
Mihalic, he formed part of the immense creative upsurge which followed
the removal of Communist Party control of literature after Tito's break
with Stalin. Dizdar is seen as the leading poet of twentieth-century
Bosnia and Herzegovina,' and most readers of what was once called
Serbo-Croatian literature would regard him as a major European figure
of the stature of Popa or Lalic, say, Holub or Pilinszky, Montale or
Elytis. And yet, unlike the poets just named, Dizdar's vibrant and original
-

poetic voice is unknown to a wider European reading public, nor has he

had a fertilizing effect on other poets in the English-reading world. This
article, a case-study of my own experiences in translating Mak Dizdar's
key work Kameni spavac (Stone Sleeper, 1972), tries to examine why.
In order to do so, and to isolate more general principles to explain
how writers from 'small' languages/cultures might find themselves
barred from (or helped into) the mainstream of world literary culture, I
use Erving Goffman's notion of the literary translator as an intercultural
'ambassador'. Ambassadors have two duties. The first is to pass on the
words of their government, just as translators pass on the words of the
original writer. The second is to negotiate on their government's behalf.
Similarly, because they are often the only individuals in the receptor
culture who can read the source language, literary translators from
lesser-known languages usually find themselves not only discovering and
evaluating 'new' writers, but also having to package and promote 'their'
writers in such a way that publishers, journal editors, reviewers, and the
public see them as worth publishing and reading.
These two duties how to pass on Dizdar's words, and how to
negotiate Dizdar's entry into the English-reading culture are the bases
-

of the two main sections of this essay. Any discussion about the linguistic
-

and cultural implications of a translation, however, is in itself an act of

linguistic and cultural communication. This means that I first need to lay
66 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
two foundations. First, communication depends on a certain degree of
shared knowledge. Hence the very fact that Dizdar, Kameni spavac, and
its themes are unknown to a wider readership means that I need to
supply this missing knowledge. Second, when communication is about
culture, there is no absolute Olympian high ground. As cultural beings,
both I, the writer, and you, gentle reader, are players in what we speak
of; and in a region as culturally polarized as former Yugoslavia, any
notion of academic impartiality is a dangerous fiction. Hence I need to
lay my own partiality on the table, in both cultural and academic terms.
Let us begin by laying the first, less disputable foundation: the facts
about Dizdar's life, work, and creative themes. Mak Dizdar was born in
Stolac, Herzegovina, in 1917. He was a member of the anti-fascist
underground in World War II, when he wrote his first poems. He
became known as a poet of rare power and originality in the late 1950s,
with the poem 'Gorcin'. Some of these poems were incorporated into
what is generally" recognized as Dizdar's master-work: the book Kameni
spavac, which evolved through various versions between 1966 and 1972,
the year after his death.
Here Dizdar addresses the mystery of the stecci the medieval
limestone tombs, some of them carved with enigmatic designs, which are
-

found throughout the Bosnian and Herzegovinan region (see Figure 1).
He also addresses the even greater mystery of those who lie buried
beneath them: the followers ('krstjani') of the schismatic Bosnian
Church, who were persecuted for their faith by the far more powerful
Churches of Rome and Byzantium. The exact details of this faith are
unclear, but it seems to have been dualist in nature, i.e. to have seen the
world as the battleground between the forces of good and evil. It also
probably saw the world as having entered the final age foretold in the
biblical Book of Revelation, when the agents of Satan would rule in the
guise of kings and popes. One legend, cited by Dizdar himself in his
anthology of medieval Bosnian texts (Antologija starih bosanskih tekstova,
Sarajevo, 1997), even tells that the Earth was created by Satan; another,
equally radical break with Church dogma was that the krstjani probably
believed that Christ came to earth as pure spirit rather than flesh. Very
soon, the present age of Satan would end with Christ's second coming,
when the faithful few would rise from their graves and enter into the
New Jerusalem, and the deluded many would be cast into the outer
darkness.
In Kameni spavac the poet speaks to the medieval believers who are
still sleeping beneath their stones, still awaiting their apocalypse.
Together they explore the nature of life and death, time and eternity,
faith and doubt, worldly persecution and heavenly justice. This
Francis R. Jones 67

Figure j. Stecak figure (Sun Christ)2

amplitude and complexity of content is paralleled on the level of form.

More than any other work of poetry that I know, Kameni spavac revels
in Bakhtin's carnivalesque the interweaving of different voices (heretic
and heretic-hunter, poet and preacher, folk-singer and esoteric scholar)
-

that is more typical of novels than of poetry. The carnivalesque, according

to Bakhtin, upsets the social order because it breaks the illusion of social
unity given by a unified, mainstream textual voice. Through this
heightened dialogue, Dizdar reveals the crucial fact that, if the hunted
keep their faith, they can be hunted down but their faith is not destroyed.
As the krstjanin says to the heretic-hunter in the poem 'Roads':

You've decided to root me out at any price

But nowhere will you find the real road
To me

(I understand you:
You're a man in a single space and time
Alive just here and now
You don't know about the boundless
68 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
Space of time
In which I exist
Present
From a distant yesterday
To a distant tomorrow
Thinking
Of you

But that's not all)

This, of course, is an existential statement about the human condition:
faith in the face of persecution and of eventual obliteration. But Dizdar
is also describing modern political reality. He knew from first-hand
experience the brutalities his people underwent in the Second World
War brutalities which were repeated on an even bloodier scale twenty
years after his death, in the genocidal attempt to crush Bosnia and
-

Herzegovina's independence in the 1990s. Thus the krstjant also represent

the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina persecuted down the centuries
for their impure or inconvenient faith, yet always somehow surviving.
-

This, the most subversive message of all, that those whose only power is
faith will outlive those whose power resides in the gun, the knife, and the
lie, has made Kameni spavac into a crucial symbol of Bosnian identity.
I began translating Kameni spavac into English, along with the works
of the Serbian poet Ivan V. Lalic, in the National Library of Bosnia and
Herzegovina (which doubled as Sarajevo's University Library) when I
was an exchange student at Sarajevo in the late 1970s. One night in 1992,
Serbian Chetnik irregulars shelled the Library and the University's
Oriental Institute with incendiary bombs; as librarians tried to rescue
what they could, some were killed by snipers. In this deliberate act of
cultural genocide (they knew what they were doing after all, a professor
of English literature and history was their commander), a million books
-

and irreplaceable manuscripts were lost, among which were many

Orthodox/Serbian texts. What they were trying to destroy, in other
words, was the very concept of Bosnian and Herzegovinan culture
which, as an amalgam of the Moslem/Bosnian, Orthodox/Serb, Catholic/
-

Croat, and Jewish heritages, can be seen as a model for European

civilization. Hence, to my mind, the translation of a major work of
Bosnian literature especially one like Kameni spavac, which speaks of
the struggle of the powerless against extermination by the powerful has
-

value not only in terms of its own intrinsic literary merit, but also as a
-

symbol of the survival of the complex, multi-patterned web of

civilization against the simplistic barbarity of fascism.
Francis R. Jones 6g
Few translations of Kameni spavac have appeared in world linguae
francae, however. French and German versions have appeared in
journals, though these fail to capture Dizdar's use of rhythm, rhyme,
word-play, and multiple voices. My own English translation took twenty
years to complete, and has just appeared with the Sarajevo publisher
Kuca bosanska but so far, no publisher in an English-speaking country
has taken it
-

on.

In the preceding attempt to explain the facts of Dizdar's life and

masterwork, I have not managed to exclude my own opinions and
attitudes, whether about Kameni spavac or about Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Hence it is time for me to declare my own hand, to make
overt and explicit the assumptions and attitudes that underlie what I
write. These are on two levels: that of translation theory, and that of
cultural politics. On the first level, it is a commonplace of modern
translation theory that the translator should be seen as a communicator,
a re-creator someone who receives a message in one language intended
for one audience in one cultural-historical context, and adapts it to fit not
-

only the constraints of a new language, but also the needs and
expectations of a new audience in a new cultural-historical context. This
holds true especially for poetry, the richest and most concentrated of all
genres in terms of language play and cultural association.
Seeing translators as intercultural ambassadors implies, however, that
their job of communication does not necessarily stop there. In Goffman's
game-theory model of social interaction, independent agents are known
as 'players', and the cause or issue which they are socially authorized to
act for is known as a 'party'.' Goffman cites the ambassador as an
example of how a player can combine two roles. The ambassador's first
role is that of 'token' or 'nuncio', someone who, though not a player in
their own right, expresses a player's or party's position. This is a useful
analogy for the translator's first task: that of expressing the original
poet's words (and wider cultural aims) in forms which the target
audience can understand and appreciate. It also stresses the limits of this
task, in other words that translators are not seen by society at large as
writers in their own right. The second of the ambassador's roles, however,
that of 'procurator', does qualify the individual as an independent player:
here the ambassador's task is to promote or negotiate the interests of the
sponsoring player (or party) with a player from another party. This
represents the role which many literary translators, especially from
lesser-known languages and cultures, often find themselves playing:
trying to persuade publishers, critics, and ordinary readers to publish
and read the text they have translated.
70 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
As for the level of cultural politics, attention is currently being paid in
the translation theory field to the social context of literary translation,
though the focus tends to be on the social implications of transferring
text rather than on how the translator interacts with other players.4
Translation, for example, especially from a smaller into a larger
language, is rightly seen by Venuti as an act which has ideological
consequences.5 Venuti, however, views ideology in largely negative
terms, seeing the translation of a 'local' work into a lingua franca as
running the constant risk of violating the original work. And yet one
might equally well see ideology in positive terms: by being translated
into a lingua franca, original writers are given a voice in which to
transmit their own or their culture's ideological message. This, of course,
implies a third element to the translator's ambassadorial role: that of
'gatekeeping', of deciding which writers are to be given a voice in the
lingua franca and which are not.6 Culture, of course, is not only 'high' or
'big C Culture, the great and lasting artistic products which only certain
people can produce. This is only part of a wider 'anthropological' or
'small c' culture, namely the sum of all people's ideas, beliefs, customs,
and products: see Figure 2.7 Nevertheless, 'big C Culture is what tends
to be valued most in the world outside the community in question.
Here the literary translator, by communicating a 'big C artefact (a
major poet, say) to the outside world, can also raise the international
status of the wider 'small c' culture of which the poet is a part.

Figure 2. 'Small c' (anthropological) culture and 'big C (high) Culture

Francis R. Jones 7i

In translating and promoting Kamem spavac / Stone Sleeper, this is

something I personally see as worth doing. If an ambassador represents
not just another player, but also the party the player stands for, this
means that the ambassador's ideological stance towards both player and

party is a factor in the transmission process. My stance towards Dizdar

is clear from what I have written so far: I see him as an important
European poet of his generation, the generation of Milosz, Pilinszky, and
Popa. And my stance towards what I regard as his party, namely Bosnian
culture, is also far from neutral. I see Bosnia as a complex but distinct
cultural, geographical, and political space, whose distinctiveness lies in its
very complexity. More than this: though I mourn the passing of
Yugoslavia, I feel that Bosnia's fragile and endangered quest for
nationhood should be respected and supported. And one way in which
the translator of Bosnian literature can support the concept of Bosnia's
nationhood is to communicate the fact that Bosnian literature is capable
of producing works of world-class 'big C worth.

* * *

Let us now turn to the main concern of this essay: the twin roles of the
translator in communicating Dizdar's Stone Sleeper. This section focuses
on the first role, that of the translator as nuncio, as transmitter of the

poet's words. Here I discuss the specific features of Dizdar's verse that
make the translator's job a hard one, and possible strategies for tackling
these features. Dizdar's verse is formally very complex and multi-vocal,
but none of the tasks which he sets his translator is in itself unique.
Literary translators worth their salt should be able to cope with richness
of word-colour, for example, and poetry translators worthy of the name
should be able to come up with a halfway-decent rhyme scheme. But
what is unique is the number of such tasks the translator has to cope with
in the same space: it is the sheer poetic richness and multi-layeredness of
Dizdar's verse, in other words, that makes the translator's job a hard one.
However, in recognizing the multi-layered nature of his verse, I found
my first strategy: that of tackling one layer at a time. In other words, that
of slowly working the raw metal of the target-text, through draft after
draft, into a final version which (ideally) should have a complex glint
similar to the source. Let us look in detail at these different layers those
of rhyme, rhythm, verse form, word-play, and poetic voice and at what
-

strategies one might use to reproduce them in English.

-

Dizdar's highly individual use of rhyme is a key feature of Katneni

spavac. He rarely follows a conventional rhyme scheme a fact which
actually increases the poetic force of his rhyme, for this makes it a highly
-
72 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
marked, idiosyncratic device. Rather than neat couplets, his poems
typically have overlapping chains of external and internal rhymes, which
combine to give complex, densely-woven riffs of sound often within an
inverted triangle verse-format that is Dizdar's trademark (see Figure 3).
-

When translating poetry into English, finding rhymes is a notoriously

hard job. This is a particular problem with conventional rhyme patterns,
however, where the demand that the end of line 1 should rhyme with the
end of line 2, say, gives very little room for manoeuvre. With Dizdar's
irregular rhyme patterns, the task is somewhat less daunting: the

Neka podzemna voda budi u jasnom

se sjajnom(ozoru)
iz svog dubokog sna i tece nekoj
dalekoj rijeci nekom
umornom

(möruV

j~Jednatrazeci nestali
kosuta zuri kroz neke
smetena zute ivrijeze)
1 trazeci
sapat ,davne,| dane] sto
:e kroz 'tavne "trave kroz rtravnen .

(pati)kad [prati] oci srne^ 6

>
Vidim ljeljena onog sto one -

i slijedece ih omamljen sve dok -

"

na zahodu sunce ne utrne'

\ s

sve dok mu koraci _ _ _

ne ucrne-1
\ j
_ _ _

Figure 3. Source-text rhyme chains

('Zapis o lovu' / 'Text about a hunt', stanzas 1-4)8
Francis R. Jones 73

translator has to play similar riffs to the original, but there is no need for
each note to be in the same place see Figure 4, which shows the first
verses of my own variation ('Text about a hunt') on Dizdar's theme from
-

'Zapis o lovu'. Comparing the two graphic analyses shows that Dizdar
has fewer but longer chains of rhyme than I do: he has six chains, most
with three or four elements, whereas I have twelve chains, all with only
two elements. Moreover, he binds the end-word of the first and last line
together in each verse, whereas I only do this in the first verse (chain 2).

An underground water(wakes)from deepest sleep()5reaks)|free

and streams through a clear and glorious(dawn)
towards a distant river
towards a weary
sea
V

Meekly tripping[between|the forest's golden^green] the (fawn)

will not stop until her(course]
5 (bringjher he7{spring)
to

her(source)-
Slipping between saplings the flustered [roe
the ochre
seeks a vanished whisper seeks the fleeting days
that(pass)between the dimlit(grass)
that flit between theffrets)
of grassy (nets) 0

I see
that_stag beguiled by the eyes of the | doe
10 (entranced 'by hen
glance) till sunset^come}
his limbs growjiumb)-
~
H ~

hisrtreadn
go red j

Figure 4. Target-text rhyme chains

('Zapis o lovu' / 'Text about a hunt', stanzas 1-4)
74 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
Interestingly, this slight loss of coherence did not strike when me when
actually translating.
When assessing textual strategies in poetry, we need to be aware that
there are two levels of text: what might be called the 'micro-text', that of
the individual poem, and the 'macro-text', that of the whole book. At
micro-text level, I could be accused here of following a strategy of
reduction, of reducing the complexity of the original. A strategy of
reduction in one micro-text, however, can be balanced out by a strategy
of augmentation in another, thus giving an overall macro-text strategy of
compensation9 in concrete terms, if a little poetic structure is lost in
some poems, a little can be added in others, thus preserving at least some
-

of the original's variety of poetic forms. A look at the rest of the volume
shows that, though I was unaware of the fact, I do often lose structuring
in some poems only to gain it in others. One place where I have added
structuring, for example, is in 'Zapis o stolid' ('A text about the see'),
where the source has only one true pair of rhymes ('Pavla'/'Dijavla'):

Kakvo to lice cudno vidim

na svetoj stolici?
Kakvo to lice vidim na stolici
Petra I Pavla?

To lice sveto obraz je kleti

Samoga Dijavla!
The translation, however, has three such links one pun (on 'see') and
of external rhymes ('recall'/'Paul', 'hell'/'Sataniel'):
-

two sets

What strange face do I see

upon the holy see?

Whose face does that face recall

on the throne of Peter and Paul?

That holy face is from hell

it's the face of Sataniel!10
-

Here, of course, the added structuring has made the target-text more
traditional in terms of rhyme scheme than the original. But although
Dizdar, as I have mentioned, usually avoids traditional rhyme schemes,
on occasion he does use them: in other words, the strategy of
Francis R. Jones 75

compensation is operating within the bounds set by the macro-text

('compensation in place', as Keith Harvey calls it). It might be pointed
out, incidentally, that some writers see compensation as a way for the
cowardly or the incompetent translator to sidestep a problem that should
be tackled head-on." To my mind, one should not be dogmatic here,
especially in poetry, where tackling a problem head-on risks busting your
head even when a direct solution is possible, it risks being an

irredeemably ugly one.

-

To turn now to metre and verse structure, Dizdar uses a variety of

metric forms: free, accentual, and syllabic. As accentual metric forms
(rhythms based on the number of stresses in a line) are the mainstay of
English-language poetry, these can usually be transferred directly. Most
South Slav poets who use fixed prosodic patterns, however, prefer
syllabic verse, where each line has the same syllable count but a variable
number of stresses. Dizdar is no exception here. An example is 'Zapis o
petorici' ('Text about the five'):
Cetvorica jednog vode
Jednog gone cetvorica

Cetvorica mrkog lica

Preko vode preko zica

Cetvorica jednog broji

Cetiri se jednog boji
Here the regular tramp of the traditional narodni osmerac ('folk eight-
syllable')underlines the relentlessness of the persecutors, who hunt to
hide their own fear. My English version runs:

Four men leading one man bound

One man whom the four men hound

Four men's faces dour and dire

Over water over wire

...

One man counted bound and led

One man whom the four men dread
76 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
Here, however, our first problem of cultural transmission arises: because
English has no real tradition of syllabic verse, a syllabic line risks
sounding unstructured. To get round this, I usually adopted a belt-and-
braces approach, laying an accentual rhythm (in this case, a truncated
trochaic tetrameter) on a syllabic base.
The reader may wonder why I used a truncated 7-syllable line rather
than an untruncated 8-syllable line. This was to avoid a poem full of
feminine rhymes (e.g. 'leading'/'bleeding') both because they are thinner
on the ground in English, with its tendency towards word-final stress,
-

and because the archetypal, atavistic nature of this poem demanded

elemental, mainly monosyllabic stems in simple verb-forms (literally, the
first four lines run 'Four men lead one / Four men hound one // Four
men of dark face / Over water over wire'). In Bosnian, by contrast,
word-stems almost always carry an unstressed grammatical suffix (e.g.
'-og' = accusative masculine singular adjective, '-e' = third person plural
verb), and thus, where feminine rhymes go with the grain of Bosnian,
masculine rhymes (at least in this poem) go with the grain of English.
I could, of course, have taken an even easier way out and translated
the narodni osmerac into a workaday, non-syllabic, English tetrameter.
But here, I felt, the specific flavour of the original would have been lost.
After all, if we domesticate everything new into something familiar, the
result is a bland MacDonaldization of world culture which defeats the
whole reason for translating literature to bring across the excitement of
the foreign and the new.
-

Many of Dizdar's riffs do not merely play on sound, however. They

often play on the etymology of words, or less frequently involve full-
scale puns, i.e. word-play between etymologically unrelated homophones.
- -

Word-play, of course, is the bane of the translator's life. I will give just
one example here. The opening lines of'Zapis na dvije vode 1' ('Text on
a Watershed i')'2 form a gravestone inscription which plays on the

etymology of the dead man's name, Radojica Bijelic:

U ovom dobrom u radosnom u bijelom u svijetu
dobri radojica bijelic vavijek sam se radovao

Literally:
In this good in (the) joyful in (the) white in (the) world
I good radojica bijelic always rejoiced
Word-plays around proper nouns are especially hard to translate. It is
the modern convention to paste proper nouns unchanged into the target-
Francis R. Jones 11

text, for they are seen as marking individuals, not classes of objects
(Hannah Jones and Hana Jovanovic are seen as two different people, not
two labels for the same person). But the different lexico-phonemic make-
up of English and Bosnian rules out not only English etymology-play but
also English punning around the words radojica and bijelic. This leaves
the translator with only one alternative: to change the medieval Bosnian
into a medieval Englishman, i.e. to translate his name.
But the problem of the word-play itself still remains. Translating
bijelic (literally 'whiteson') as the surname 'white' loses the word-play
with 'u bijelom svijetu', which has the idiomatic meaning of 'in the
...

wide world'. English equivalents exist for radojica (literally 'joyful'),

however: there are the women's names Joy and Joyce, and 'Joyce' could
also make a convincing surname. In the end to cut a very long story
short I settled for the following ('ay' has the meaning of 'always' here,
-

and the capitalization of T forces capitalization on the rest of the verse):

-

In this good worldes joyes

I Good Abel Joyce was ay good able to rejoyce
It will be noticed that the. etymological play on 'radojica'/'Joyce' has
been reproduced, but the one on bijelic has been replaced by a triple pun
('I Good Abel' 'ay good able'). Punning is something which English,
with its relative lack of word-endings, is better at than Bosnian, which
-

has a rich inflectional system. This compensates for the fact that English
finds it harder than Bosnian to play etymological games the reason
being that where there is one large word-family in Bosnian (rad-, for
-

example), there tend to be two smaller word-families in English, one

Germanic and one Romance (in this case, 'glad-' and 'joy-').
A final feature of Dizdar's poetic craft is his carnivalesque use of a
range of distinctive poetic voices between or within different poems. The
first, 'neutral', voice is that of the dialogue here and now between the
poet as narrator and questioner, and the sleeper answering from beneath
the stone. The idiom is modernist, mid-twentieth-century, and though
the heavy use of internal rhyme and etymological play is unusual in
English-language verse, it breaks no receptor-genre rules: see, for
example, 'Zapis o lovu' / 'Text about a hunt', above, where the speaker
is the sculptor of the hunting scene on the stecak.
When Dizdar uses folk rhythms he speaks in a second voice. The use
of syllabic, end-stopped 8- or i o-syllable lines with a mid-line caesura is
typical of semi-improvised epic poetry, a tradition in which the South
Slav region is exceptionally rich. By taking on this voice, as in 'Zapis o
petorici' ('Text about the five'), above, the poet is no longer a writer of
78 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper

poems in the modern mould: he has become a Homeric singer of tales, a

teller of myths. Here, even though it is technically possible to transfer
the verse form into English, this loses the resonance which, in the
original, helps to push the story of the four hunters and the victim they
fear into the realm of the mythic, the archetypal.
When the krstjani are speaking in their own time rather than the
poet's, they speak in a third voice their own medieval Bosnian, as in the
poem 'Gorcin' ('Gorchin'):
-

Ase lezit
Vojnik Gorcin
U zemlji svojoj
Na bastini
Tuzdi

Zgiboh od boli
Nepreboli
Volju
A djevu mi ugrabise
U robje

Ako Kosaru sretnete

Na putevima
Gospodnjim
Molju
Skazite
Za vjernost
Moju
Linguistically, this is transferable into English of a similar vintage. With
a little help from Chaucer and the OED, a mock late-fourteenth-century
text can be reconstructed in English:

Here lyeth
Gorchin soldier
In his owen lande
In a straungers
Demesne
Francis R. Jones 79

I sterved of sicknesse
Withouten hele

I loved
But my lasse was
Into bondage taken

If thou Cossara meetest

Upon the paths
Of our Lorde
Tell her
I bid thee
That I my troth
Did kepe

Culturally, however, we run into more problems here. Care has to be

taken not to make the target-text too 'authentically aged', lest it be as
opaque to the reader as genuine Middle English: 'londe', 'stede', and
'starf, for example, appeared in a first draft, but were changed to 'lande',
'demesne', and 'sterved' to keep at least some comprehensibility.1' But
creating an archaic English with the teeth pulled, as it were, creates the
opposite risk, that of echoing the mock-medievalisms often seen as
typical of nineteenth-century English verse. This lays the modern
translator open to the scorn of reviewers steeped in the English-language
modernist idiom, which defined itself to a great extent in opposition to
nineteenth-century norms. A recent UK reviewer, for example,
castigated my translations of Dizdar in Chris Agee's Scar on the Stone
anthology (Newcastle, 1998) for their 'sham medievalism'. In other
words, a technique that is innovatory in the source culture (there was
much mock folk-poetry in nineteenth-century South Slav verse, but to
the best of my knowledge there was little mock medievalism) can fall foul
of a powerful taboo in the target culture.
A fourth voice is that of the Scriptures: that of the Gospel writer, and,
through him, of Christ and the apostles. An example is in 'loza i njene
roge' ('the vine and its branches') from the cycle 'Radimlja' (I have
emphasized the scriptural quotations in this excerpt):
Ovdje je prisutan onaj
Koji po vjernom citanju rece
Az esam loza istinia a otac moj je vinogradar
I vsaku rozgu u meni a ploda ne da ja cu odsjeci
AI onu koja rada da polje bude bolje
8o Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
Da sladi dar i plod veci
Cistim

On ceka me od vijeka
On ceka i vidim ga zacijelo
I silazim k njemu
Kroz to bijelo
Lozje
Here the process of cultural transfer is less problematic. There is an
English version of the Bible with a similar cultural weight, though of a
slightly later era the Authorized Version of 1611 to use as source
material. And although incorporating biblical quotations implies the
- -

use of archaic language, which again risks breaking modernist taboos,

the biblical theme of the poem might be said to justify this more
overtly:
Present here is He
Who said for verily it is writ
/ am the true vine and my Father is the husbandman and Every branch
in me
That beareth not fruit I shall take away
But that the field wax fat the fruit be sweeter the root be deeper
The branch that beareth
I shall purge

...

Since ages past He awaiteth me

He waiteth and Him I surely see
I descend towards him down the line
Of this white
Vine

A final voice is that of the author's Herzegovinan dialect for

example, 'hiza' instead of 'kuca' for 'house'. Here, to a certain extent, I
-

have used my own Yorkshire dialect, whether overtly (words such as

'lass') or covertly (such as the use of 'thee' and 'thy', which for me have
a homely, down-to-earth feel, and are only archaic in the standard-

English part of my language repertoire). One poem, however a ballad-

Francis R. Jones 81

of a mother who has lost her son in battle set off powerful cultural
echoes of the Scots ballad 'The twa corbies':
-

Uzese mu obje ruke

ostavise rane dvije

Grdne rane neprebolne

jednoj boli inokosnoj
Sve mrtvace sahranise
a on osta tavnu vranu

Sta ce majka samohrana

na svijetu bescutnome?
This echo was so powerful that, although the source-text is not

geographically marked (rather it is 'folk-epically marked', as described

above), I asked my fellow-translator Brian Holton to retranslate my
English draft into his native Scots:
They hackit off his airms and left
twa muckle gantin wounds

They left twa wounds that willna heal

ti be ma lanesome doul

They buried aa the deid bar ane

at him black corbies pike

Whit maun a kinless mither dae

in this uncarin warld

Some might say that a change of this scale in effect, switching to a

different language goes beyond the translator's brief. It does, however,
-

highlight the fact that the translator is a creator, a visible actor in the
-

process of communication. And it is better, to my mind, to be criticized

for excessive or misjudged creativity than to be criticized for translating
the words but losing the poetry.
Kameni spavac is, then, a carnivalesque work. If the distinct voices in
its carnival were normalized away, their foreignness domesticated and
their innovativeness smoothed into the same bland modernist-speak
advocated by the reviewer mentioned earlier, the work would not only
82 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
lose much of its multi-coloured poetic weave: it would also lose a key
element of structuring. On the one hand, changes of voice between
poems from contemporary to medieval, from free verse to epic or
incantation often serve to mark out phases in the macro-text. On the
-

other, changes of voice within a poem often have a semantic function. In

-

'Zapis o vitezu' ('Text about a knight'), for example, a change of voice

from medieval to modern Bosnian wrenches us from past illusion (the
voice of the 'doughty knighte' who remains faithful to his lord unto
death) to present disillusion (the voice of the poet who knows the lord's
real nature). In the excerpt below, I have added an arrow (—>) to show
this change:

U buni jednoj on pade

U pobuni protiv nevjerstva svijeta on skonca slavno
—>
Umrije davno pred mnogo godina
Umrije a mrtav
Jos nije
Zapitaj sad za ime njegovog gospodina
Da djelo mu bijase nevjerstvo
I ime mu bese zlo
To samo se
Sada
Zna

My version runs as follows:

He fell in a rebellioun
In a rising against the worldes faythlessnesse he dyed gloryously
— He died
many long years ago
He died but he's still
Not dead

Now ask the name of his lord

That his deed was faithless

And his name was evil
Is only
Known
Today
Francis R. Jones »3
The process of translation does not end with typing out the last
translated poem. This is merely the point at which the translator's
ambassadorship shifts from the role of nuncio, the speaker of the poet's
words, to that of procurator, who tries to ensure that the words are
listened to. So what are the specific difficulties inherent in this second
role in this case, that of promoting Mak Dizdar's work to an English-
reading audience?
-

To begin with, the subject-matter of Stone Sleeper is highly complex

and the cultural/historical background is unknown to most non-Bosnian
readers, which means that they lack much of the contextual knowledge
needed to understand the text. Some of this knowledge can, however, be
communicated within the translated book. Thus the bilingual edition of
Kameni spavac / Stone Sleeper has a Translator's Afterword giving basic
information about the krstjani, and a set of Translator's Notes. Here, for
example, is the translator's note to 'Text about the five' (see above):
This poem dates from 1940-1941, at the height of this century's
first rape of Bosnia. To guard against the risk of it being read by
the Ustasa or Nazi occupiers, Dizdar wrote it in the Arabic-based
alhamiado ('foreign') script, thus making it seem like a religious
text. This was the main script used for the Bosnian language under
the Turkish occupation, from the early 15th to the late 19th
century.'4
But much of the allusion in Kameni spavac is visual rather than factual:
to the stecci and their carvings. These too are familiar to a Bosnian
readership but not to an international one, and this makes illustrations
virtually essential to a translated text. With the bilingual Kuca bosanska
version, the designer Dzevad Hozo has achieved a striking interplay
between graphics and text: the edition, in fact, can be said to
communicate as much to the eye as to the inner ear.
But however well a book explains cultural unknowns, communication
only takes place if the book is read. Translated literature, especially
poetry, remains a minority interest in Great Britain and the USA.
Though a couple of poets from the Yugoslavia of the Tito era, such as
Vasko Popa or Ivan V. Lalic, have established a reputation among
readers of poetry in English and have had a fertilizing effect on poets
writing in English, print-runs of even their works in translation are no
more than 1,000 copies. Moreover, the overall year-on-year increase in
books published in the English-speaking world means that small poetry
presses, the traditional outlet for translated poetry, have to strive ever
harder to stay trading in an ever more competitive market. This means
84 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
in turn that a translator is going to have an uphill struggle to find a
publisher willing to take a risk on a new foreign poet unless, of course,
the work is of immediate appeal to the book-buying public.
-

Dizdar's poetic craft and his breathtaking intellectual and artistic

vision mark him out as a poet of European rather than merely regional
stature, as I hope this paper has suggested. But we have found as yet no
British or US publisher willing to enter into a co-publishing agreement
on Stone Sleeper, which would be the only way of ensuring distribution
to British and US bookshops, for distributors do not take books on a
one-off basis. So why are British and US publishers unwilling to take on
an unknown translated poet of Dizdar's stature? I mentioned earlier that
what makes the task of textual transformation difficult is Dizdar's sheer
poetic talent. I believe that this is also what makes the task of cultural
promotion a difficult one. The two South Slav poets just mentioned
gained reputations abroad by writing poetry which was not only of high
quality, but which had points of contact with the receptor culture. The
weird yet universal cosmologies and bestiaries of Vasko Popa's early
works struck an immediate and enthusiastic chord with Ted Hughes,
who was writing very similar verse in English, and who played a key role
in promoting Popa and other 'Eastern European' poets to a British
readership during the 1960s. Similarly, Ivan V. Lalic's vivid musings on
time and culture have strong echoes of Yeats and Eliot, and his localities
Italy, Dubrovnik, Greece form part of the general European cultural
landscape, familiar from holiday postcards, TV documentaries, and
- -

schoolbooks. Poets such as these are new enough to be exciting to the

receptor culture, whilst being familiar enough to be accepted by it.
The poetic landscape of Kameni spavac, by contrast, is very rich but
very strange. Its topography breaks target-culture rules as to which
voices should be heard in modern poetry. More importantly, perhaps, it
is a long way off the wider European literary map not so much in terms
of geography (now, sadly, most people in Europe know where Bosnia is
-

and what it looks like from TV war reports), but certainly in terms of
history and cosmology, of ideas and artefacts. Dizdar's themes the
stecci, the medieval 'heretics', his interweaving of Christian, dualist, and
-

Islamic esoteric philosophies may well be so specialist, according to this

argument, that they act as a barrier to the reader. But then, how can we
-

explain the European cult success of Emile Ladurie's Montaillou, a

chronicle of dualist heresy in medieval France, or of Milorad Pavic's
Dictionary of the Khazars (Pavic, 1989), a structurally highly innovative
'lexicon novel' about an even more distant, weird, and little-known
people? Would not Stone Sleeper, with similarly alien yet compelling
ingredients, also be a candidate for European cult status?
Francis R. Jones 85
One answer be that Montaillou and Dictionary of the Khazars
might
are novels, which tend to be a less risky investment for a publisher than
collections of poetry. And anyway, cult status, by its very nature, is an
unpredictable thing there are no recipes here. A second answer might
be that recognition is just a matter of time: now that Dizdar's work can
-

be read in English, sooner or later he will become recognized for the

leading European postwar poet that he is. A third answer takes issue with
the question. Why is it so crucial that an exploration, no matter how
exhilarating, of a particular landscape be communicated to those who
know nothing of that landscape? Is there not a tinge of cultural
imperialism (I accuse myself here) in the assumption that if a book is to
appear in English, it must be published in a native-English-speaking
country by a native-English-speaking publisher? If Stone Sleeper is a
book so deeply and numinously interwoven into the landscape of
Bosnia's present and past, then should the translation not be published
in Bosnia, and should Bosnia not be the centre of its official and
unofficial networks of distribution? This would mean that those who
read it in translation are those who have chosen to travel to Bosnia and
understand at least something of this landscape at first hand. Or those
abroad who have taken the trouble to get to know this landscape at a
distance, whether through personal contacts or simple feelings of
solidarity.
In Venuti's thesis, translation from a to a major language is
minor
seen almost exclusively as violation, as a of literary grave-robbing. In
sort
real life, however, a 'small' source culture may often much more often,
I suspect see translation into a lingua franca as empowerment, as a
-

means of making one's voice heard on the world stage. And if the source
-

rather than the target country is the centre of publication and

distribution efforts, then source-culture players also have direct control
over this process. Thus, for example, copies of the 1999 edition of Stone

Sleeper have been distributed to Bosnian embassies world-wide (bringing

our ambassador analogy full circle); and at a recent conference of world
leaders in Sarajevo, the delegates were each presented with a copy of the
1999 book. Though this stresses the fact that translating a work into a
world lingua franca has ideological consequences, it is hardly an act of
violation or appropriation by the target culture: rather, the target
language has been appropriated by the source culture to promote its own
identity in accordance with its own needs.
Hence, at the time of writing, the translator's first role that of
translating the text into English has been performed for Mak Dizdar's
-

Stone Sleeper. But the second role that of enabling the text to be read
-

in the wider English-reading world has been fulfilled with only partial
-

-
86 Mak Dizdar's Stone Sleeper
success. Though publication in Bosnia means that the translation can be
used to promote Bosnian culture, Dizdar deserves to be read in English
for his intrinsic merits, not just because he was Bosnian and this can
only happen with distribution networks in the UK and US.
-

Like any case-study, this discussion has implications outside the work
in question. The first is one of cultural politics. Translation is often seen
as the blood transfusion by which the receptor culture gains new life, but
it can also enrich the source culture translation of a 'smaller' nation's
literary works into a world language can crucially strengthen that
-

nation's cultural credentials, as George Steiner has pointed out in After

Babel. And when a nation's survival is a tenuous thing, as with Bosnia
and Herzegovina, it needs all the credentials it can get. Secondly,
innovativeness and complexity in a writer's texts and worlds are usually
seen as key markers of literary talent. This, paradoxically, can make a

major poet much harder to translate and promote than a poet of more
moderate gifts, or a poet whose style and content already strike chords in
the receptor culture. When the translator is translating the text,
conveying the rich texture of the original without going against the grain
of the receptor language and literary culture involves difficult and not
always satisfactory choices. And when the translator is promoting the
text, a large amount of the translator's own time and energy can be taken
up in search of publishers, distributors, and reviewers.
Finally, when looking at the social implications of literary translating,
research and theory-building in the Translation Studies field have
focused on what texts do rather than on what writers and translators do.
This is a balance which needs redressing. After all, texts are translated by
people; and in places and times of great political and cultural sensitivity,
like ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the choices and actions of translators
have consequences.
The Language Centre, University of Newcastle

Notes
1. When conciseness is made to take precedence over accuracy in this essay, I
use the terms 'Bosnia', 'Bosnian', etc, for short.
2. From the parallel-text Kameni spavac I Stone Sleeper, translated by Francis
R. Jones, illustrated by Dzevad Hozo, with afterword by Rusmir
Mahmutcehajic (Sarajevo, 1999).
3. Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction (Oxford, 1970), pp. 86-9. Cecilia
Wadensjö's Interpreting as Interaction (Linköping, 1992) has drawn my
attention to the potential of social interaction theories in Translation
Studies.
4. Examples of recent studies on translation stressing social context include
Francis R. Jones 87
Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Roman Alvarez and Carmen-Africa
Vidal (Clevedon, 1996); Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and
Cross-Cultural Texts, edited by Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier
(Pittsburgh, 1995); and Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility: A
History of Translation (London, 1995).
5. In both Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility and his The Scandals of
Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London, 1998).
6. See Suzanne and Richard Scollon, 'Face in Interethnic Communication', pp.
156-88 in Language and Communication, edited by Jack C. Richards and
Richard Schmidt (London, 1983), and Wadensjö (n. 3), pp. 28-33.
7. This distinction, and Fig. 2, are based on the analysis in Barry Tomalin and
Susan Stempelski's Cultural Awareness (Oxford, 1993).
8. The different styles of lines and boxes here serve to distinguish between the
different sound-chains.
9. See Keith Harvey's entry on 'Compensation' in The Routledge Encyclopedia
of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker (London, 1998).
10. Satan in some dualist texts, not only the creator of the Earth, but also
Christ's elder brother.
-

11. For example, Peter Fawcett, Translation and Language (Manchester, 1997),

PP- 31-3
12. The 'watershed' refers to the pitched roofs of many stecci, which makes them
look like houses for the dead.
13. See my 'Four-dimensional Crosswords: Poetry Translation Strategies', pp.
520-7 in Transferre Necesse Est, edited by Kinga Klaudy and Jänos Kohn
(Budapest, 1997), and compare George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford, 1975),
pp. 336-8, on Emile Littre's attempt at a 'synchronic replica' of Dante's
Inferno in the langue d'oil which Dante himself had known.
14. Kameni spavac I Stone Sleeper (n. 2), p. 252.