INTERDISCIPLINARITY AS THE KEY OF TRANSLATION- SERBIAN TRANSLATIONS OF POUND’S POETRY
INTERDISCIPLINARITY AS THE KEY OF TRANSLATION- SERBIAN TRANSLATIONS OF POUND’S POETRY

Summary/Abstract: The paper studies the need for interdisciplinary approach in literary translation, especially poetic translation. The aim is to show the insufficience of a single-discipline approach in translating Ezra Pound`s poetry. Serbo-Croatian translations of Pound’s poetry are analysed with special focus placed on his long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, more precisely on Section IX of the poem titled “Mr Nixon”. Pound is well known for many deep reminiscences, intertextuality, allusions, citations in a number of different languages, inclusion of names of known and unknown persons - politicians, ancient heroes, mythological characters, poets, philosophers, but also his friends and acquaintances. The poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley marked a shift of the poet’s interest from art to social issues, or rather widening of his primary interest in aesthetic issues to include social concerns. The style of the poem is consequently characterized by bitter irony, anger, and impersonal sympathy, its difficulty being in “extreme condensation of the images and allusions”. It is seen as “elliptical, coolly wrought, delicately pointed satire”. Interpreting and translating Pound’s poetry demands deep understanding of antroponyms, phrases and symbols, which have a specific role in the text. The aim of the paper is to describe procedures selected for translating Pound`s poetry into Serbo-Croatian. In addition, the paper tries to define and explain the adequacy of chosen translation procedures and their dependence on characteristics of the original text. Contrastive analysis of two Serbian translations of Mr Nixon and the original poem shows that the effect of the translation is achieved not only by semantic equivalence of the lexemes, lines and sentences, but much more by the equivalence of illustrating social status and cultural patterns in linguistic behaviour of the character. As the central part of “Mr Nixon” consists only of Mr Nixon`s words, the “spirit of the poem” depends to a great extent on social and cultural picture of the character, i.e. on preserving his characterization through the idiolect and sociolect. The analysis of this part of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is supported by its comparison to the other sequences of the whole poem where interdisciplinary approach is crucial in translation. Through numerous reminiscences in the poem Pound makes a collection of the “cultural units“ of the whole civilisation. The ironic and satiric language of the poem finds its equivalents in the translations at different levels, thus giving various contributions to the poem’s “afterlife”.

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