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Part of
Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology
Edited by Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn and Joep Leerssen
[Benjamins Translation Library 119] 2016
► pp. 299–313

Nation in translation

The South Slavic mythomoteurs in the early modern period

The South Slavic cultural sphere has always been a liminal zone of cultural hybridizations and syncretisms. In this article the complex features and modalities of multilayered and multidirectional cultural translations and transfers within the South Slavic region are illustrated by a comparative analysis of auto-images which were constitutive elements of the most influential early modern Croatian and Serbian mythomoteurs. These points are exemplified on the works of two authors: first, on the historiographical opus of a Croatian polymath Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652–1713) who was both the discursive creator of the exclusivist Croatian (proto)national ideology and the author of the first history of the Serbs; and second, on Slavo-Serbian chronicles of a Serbian historian Đorđe Branković (1665–1711). Although both of these early modern mythomoteurs displayed many structural similarities as a result of manifold textual, intertextual and contextual translation processes, they paradoxically formed an ideological axis of exclusivist Croatian and Serbian 19th-century national ideologies.

Keywords: Pavao Ritter Vitezović, Đorđe Branković, early modern mythomoteur , cultural translation
Published online: 25 February 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.119.17bla
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