Merely Displaced, not Disnationed or Dispirited
Merely Displaced, not Disnationed or Dispirited

Summary/Abstract: The Balkans as a location inspires researchers with its concoction of nations, languages and cultures, so interwoven and intrinsically unique at the same time, that it is almost impossible to separate the ingredients from the whole without losing its original taste and attraction. The exploration of a spatial area presented as one woman’s voyage from her native Thessaloniki to Belgrade, with a dash of freshness from Croatian shores depicted via the character of Stipe, makes Marija Knežević’s Ekaterini (2013) an excellent challenge for pursuing the possibility of seeing whether it is plausible to feel an unequivocal inborn sense of longing in the translated text, a longing which the main character carries with her during her displacement from Greece to Yugoslavia, a longing which represents the mythical characteristics of the Balkan peoples. By understanding the translated text as yet another transfer of culture, this time through the translator’s understanding of Balkaness, this paper will try to track the line of longing for one’s place of origin through the senses, smells and language the characters possess. oreover, by investigating the target language text not as a product, but as a process, the research will apply the apparatus of cultural translation theories in order to establish the presence (or absence) of the translator’s self and to elicit examples of possible cultural borders or border zones, cultural hybridity and other issues which are the results of the material movement of the characters from one spatial point to another.

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