Cover not available
Article published In:
Transnational Image Building: Linking up Translation Studies, Reception Studies and Imagology
Edited by Paola Gentile, Fruzsina Kovács and Marike van der Watt
[Translation Spaces 10:1] 2021
► pp. 94–114

The Western Balkans in translated children’s literature

Location-dependent images of (self)representation

ORCID logo | Hong Kong Baptist University

This study approaches translations as framing and representation sites that can serve to either contest or promote stereotypes. Critically looking at textual and visual images of the source culture, the discussion considers how the particular location of different participants in the translation production process contributes to the presentation of violence as a predominant image of Western Balkan nations. The analysis uncovers networks of source-based production participants focusing on images of ‘nesting’ Balkanisms and self-representations centring on love and humaneness. On the other hand, networks led by editors located in the target culture often emphasise the preconceived stereotypes of dominant violence in the Western Balkans or turn towards globalising the images of violence.

Keywords: imagology, children’s literature, Western Balkans, visual images, location
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The image of the Western Balkans
    • 2.1How others see us
    • 2.2Globalised hetero-images
    • 2.3Nesting self-images
    • 2.4How we want to be seen
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.20011.tod
References

Primary

Bashevski, Dimitar
2007 Anya’s Diary. Trans. Will Firth. Skopje: Slovo.Google Scholar
2003 Dnevnikot na Anja. Skopje: Slovo. [Башевски, Димитар 2003 Дневникот на Ања. Скопје: Слово.]Google Scholar
Ćurčić, Jelena
(ed) 2013 Serbian Fairy Tales. Trans. Jelena Ćurčić. London: Flying Fish Publications.Google Scholar
Ćopić, Branko
1949 Ježeva kućica. Belgrade/Zagreb: Novo pokolenje. [Ћопић, Бранко 1949 Јежева кућица. Београд/Загреб: Ново поколење].Google Scholar
2010 Hedgehog’s Home. Trans. Susan Curtis. London: Istros Books.Google Scholar
Elsie, Robert
Ed. 2015 Albanian Folktales and Legends. Trans. Robert Elsie. London: Centre for Albanian Studies.Google Scholar
Đurišić, Dušan
(ed) 1995 Beauty of All Times: An Anthology of Children’s Short Stories by Montenegrin Authors. Trans. Dragan Vugdelić. Podgorica: Association of Literary Translators of Montenegro.Google Scholar
(ed) 1993 Uvijek Ljepota. Podgorica: Trag. [Ђуришић, Душан 1993 Увијек љепота. Подгорица: Траг].Google Scholar
Halilbegovich, Nadja
2008 My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary. Toronto: Kids Can Press.Google Scholar
Halili, Qëndresë
2017 War Diary: We children of Kosovo, We Children of the War. Trans. Qëndresë Halili. Bloomington, IN: Author House.Google Scholar
Huseinović, Kašmir
2008 A Tale of Snowman. Zagreb: Kašmir Promet.Google Scholar
Filipović, Zlata
1994a Zlatin dnevnik. Zagreb: Znanje.Google Scholar
1994b Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. Trans. Christina Pribićević-Zorić. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
2006 Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo. Trans. Christina Pribićević-Zorić. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Lovrenčić, Sanja
2004 A Tale of Sigismunda and Krpimir. Trans. Sanja Lovrenčić and Peter Carrier. Zagreb: Autorska kuća.Google Scholar
Meandžija, Bojana
2016 Run! Don’t wait for me. Trans. Volga Vukelja Dawe, Anita Benčec Nikolovski. Zagreb: Alfa.Google Scholar
Petrlik Huseinović, Andrea
2004 Ciconia Ciconia White Stork. Trans. Ludwit Bauer. Zagreb: Kašmir Promet.Google Scholar
2012 Love. Trans. Erika Katačić Kožić. Zagreb: Kašmir Promet.Google Scholar
Rakidžija, Anita
2006 A Dubrovnik War Story: They Won’t Hurt Me, Mommy! Trans. Mario Sopa. Dubrovnik: Croatian association of civilian victims of the War.Google Scholar
Seraphinoff, Michael
ed. 2006 Some Great Old Stories from the Old Country. Trans. Michael Seraphinoff. Greenbank: Nettle Hollow.Google Scholar

Secondary

Bakić-Hayden, Milica
1995 Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54 (4): 917–31. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Batchelor, Kathryn
2018 Translation and Paratexts. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beller, Manfred
2007 “Perception, Image, Imagology.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character – A Critical Survey, edited by Beller Manfred and Joep Leerssen, 3–16. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beller, Manfred and Joep Leerssen
(eds) 2007 Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character – A Critical Survey. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bjelić, Dušan
2011 Normalising the Balkans: Geopolitics of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry. Burlington: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Chan, Leo Tak-hung
2010 Readers, Reading and Reception of Translated Fiction in Chinese: Novel Encounters. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.Google Scholar
Cheung, Martha P. Y.
2013 “Academic Navel Gazing? Playing the Game up Front? – Pages from the Notebook of a Translation Anthologist.” In Translation in Anthologies and Collections (19th and 20th centuries), edited by Teresa Seruya, Lieven D’hulst, Alexandra Assis Rosa, and Maria Lin Moniz, 75–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dewan, Pauline
2004 The House as Setting, Symbol and Structural Motif in Children’s Literature. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press.Google Scholar
di Giovanni, Janine
1994 “Foreword.” In Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo, Zlata Filipović, pp. v–xiv. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
European Commission
2008 “Western Balkans: Enhancing the European Perspective.” Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council [SEC(2008) 288] 5 March.Google Scholar
Đurović, Žarko
2012 “Temeljenje na vlastitim umjetničkim i nacionalnim kriterijumima [Based on Local Artistic and National Criteria].” In Prostrani vidici, edited by Dušan Đurišić, 182–184. Podgorica: Udruženje crnogorskih pisaca za đecu i mlade.Google Scholar
Goldsworthy, Vesna
1998 Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Hammond, Andrew
2010 British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hölter, Achim
2007 “Comics.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character, A Critical Survey, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, 306–308. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hudson, Cindy
2010 “Interview with Zlata Filipovic.” Mother Daughter Book Club.com 17 February.Google Scholar
Hutchinson, Zoë
2011 The Translated Work in the Global Context: Pedagogical Appropriation of Zlata’s Diary in the USA. World Literature, 404 (2) [URL]. Accessed July 19, 2014.
Jones, Francis R.
2009 “Embassy Networks: Translating Post-war Bosnian Poetry into English.” In Agents of Translation, edited by John Milton, and Paul Bandia, 301–325. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunter and Theo van Leeuwen
2006 Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Second edition. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
1990 Reading Images. Victoria: Deakin University Press.Google Scholar
Kuran-Burçoğlu, Nedret
2009 “The Memory Between Reality and Imagination – A Comparison of Memories of Jean-Baptiste Vanmour (18th cent.) & Jean-Leon-Gerome (19th cent.) of the Ottoman Empire as Represented in Their Paintings.” In Reflections on the Image of the Turk in Europe, edited by Nedret Kuran-Burçoğlu, 53–65. Istanbul: The Isis Press.Google Scholar
2000 “At the Crossroads of Translation Studies and Imagology.” In Translation in Context, edited by Andrew Chesterman, Natividad Gallardo San Salvador, and Yves Gambier, 143–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kušan, Ivan
1994 “Urednička Napomena [Editor’s Notes].” In Zlatin Dnevnik by Zlata Filipović, 215–220. Zagreb: Znanje.Google Scholar
Leerssen, Joep
2000 “The Rhetoric of National Character: A Programmatic Survey.” Poetics Today, 21 (2): 267–292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 “Imagology: History and Method.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Character, A Critical Survey, edited by Manfred Beller, and Joep Leerssen, 17–32. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moyle, Lachlan
2004 Drawing Conclusions: An Imagological Survey of Britain and the British and Germany and the Germans in German and British Cartoons and Caricatures 1945–2000. Ph.D. diss., University of Osnabruck.Google Scholar
Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott
2001 How Picturebooks Work. London: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Norris, David A.
1999 In the Wake of the Balkan Myth. London: Macmillan Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Sullivan, Emer
2011 “Imagology Meets Children’s Literature.” International Research in Children’s Literature, 4 (1): 1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pellatt, Valerie
2013 “Introduction”. In Text, Extratext, Metatext and Paratext in Translation, edited by Valerie Pellatt, 1–6. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sipe, Lawrence and Caroline E. McGuire
2006 “Picturebook Endpapers: Resources for Literary and Aesthetic Interpretation”, Children’s Literature in Education, 37 (4): 291–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Soenen, Johan
1995 Imagology in the Framework of Translation Studies.” In Bella: Essays on Translation, Imagology and Literature, 17–22. Antwerp: Linguistica Antwerpiensia.Google Scholar
Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright
2009 Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Todorov, Tzvetan
2010 The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilisations. Trans. Andrew Brown. Cambridge: Polity. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Todorova, Marija
2018 “Into the Dark Woods: A Cross-cultural Re-imagination of Home.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 56 (4): 46–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “Children’s Voices from War Zones: Muted by Adult Mediation.” Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature 55 (2): 20–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Todorova, Maria N.
2009 Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
T.J.
2012 Montenegrin Singers and Poets: A Literary Awakening in Montenegro. The Economist 22 May.Google Scholar
Weststeijn, Thijs
2007 “Visual Arts.” In Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters, edited by Manfred Beller, and Joep Leerssen, 451–455. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Živković, Marko
2001 Nešto između: simbolička geografija Srbije. Filozofija i društvo, [Something In-between: the Symbolic Geography of Serbia. Philosophy and Society ] XVIII1: 73–110.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj
1997 “Uzivanje u pokornosti i sluganstvu.” [The Enjoyment of Submission and Slavery], Naša borba, 5 (1): 34–37.Google Scholar

Communication with key participants

Bashevski, Dimitar
14 December 2011 Face-to-face communication. Author of Anya’s Diary and owner and editor at Slovo publishing house, North Macedonia. Communication conducted in Macedonian.Google Scholar
Curtis, Susan
15 July 2012 E-mail communication. Translator of Hedgehog’s Home by Branko Ćopić and editor/owner of Istros Books publisher, UK. Communication conducted in English.Google Scholar
Đurišić, Dušan
16 January 2013 E-mail communication. Editor of Beauty of All Times: Anthology Short Stories by Montenegrin Authors for Children. Communication conducted in Montenegrin.Google Scholar
Pribichevich-Zorić, Christina
. April 2014 E-mail communication. Translator of Zlata’s Diary by Zlata Filipović. Communication conducted in English.Google Scholar
Rašček, Sanja
24 March 2014 E-mail interview. Illustrator of Hedgehog’s Home by Branko Copic. Communication conducted in English.Google Scholar
Vugdelić, Dragan
3 February 2014 E-mail communication. Translator of Beauty of All Times edited by Dušan Đurišić. Communication conducted in English.Google Scholar