Ethics, Aestetics, and Decision. Literary Translating in the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession
Ethics, Aestetics, and Decision. Literary Translating in the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession

Summary/Abstract: The last decade and a half of the twentieth century saw a rapid and radical transformation of the European political space. The most traumatic of these transformations was that of former Yugoslavia, where a complex of extreme nationalist agendas and brutal anti-secessionist campaigns resulted in the deaths of a quarter of a million people and the expulsion of many more (for overviews, see e.g. Woodward, 1995; Silber & Little, 1997). Inevitably, the violent redrawing of political frontiers in the ex- Yugoslav space in the 1990s went along with an equally violent redrawing of cultural frontiers (Wachtel, 1998) – a process often informed by ethnically exclusive nationalisms which attempted to harness all aspects of culture to the greater glory of the narod (the people, the nation). But cultural frontiers are not mere abstracts – they run through people. Thus many former Yugoslavs have found their complex, multi-rooted identity forced into a dour monoethnic straitjacket (Miočinović, in press), or have found their cultural and personal loyalties painfully divided. Nevertheless, as the wars now begin to recede into the past and the new frontiers become taken for granted, there are gradual but increasing efforts to rebuild trust and reopen lines of cultural communication between states and communities in the region.[...]

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