Abstract
This essay discusses two twenty-first-century poetic translations of Beowulf into South Slavic languages: Croatian by Mate Maras (2001) and Macedonian by Dragi Mihajlovski (2013). Neither Maras nor Mihajlovski evoke the recent Balkan wars and their aftermath, nor do they consistently invoke the local epic traditions often considered analogous to Beowulf. Both translators practice a kind of defamiliarization, but in different ways. Maras occasionally deploys archaisms reminiscent of older Croatian literature, early Germanic borrowings into Slavic, and even Indo-European cognates, suggesting the temporal layering of the Anglo-Saxon poem. Mihajlovski, in contrast, creates a thoroughly baroque Beowulf, mixing disparate stylistic registers, bringing together distant geographies, and featuring more compounds than his source text. The essay concludes by asserting the value of those engagements with Beowulf that show us what the original does and those that show us the opposite, what it does not do.
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Notes
See Heaney’s preface (2000, 9–30, esp. 21–30).
Maras does translate The Song of Roland (2015) into a familiar poetic mode, that of the traditional decasyllabic South Slavic heroic epic. For a review, see Klaić (2015).
For partial verse translations into Croatian, consult Suvin (1991) and Jurkić-Šunjić (1999). A single version, in prose, exists in Serbian (Kovačević, 1982). I use Klaeber’s third edition (1950) to quote Beowulf in Old English. When the line numbers in Maras/Mihajlovski, Klaeber, and Modern English versions match, I cite them only once. Translations from Croatian and Macedonian are mine.
Writing about Turkisms in contemporary Macedonian, Friedman gives three kinds of contexts likely to feature a larger number of such loanwords than the standard: ‘1) historical/epic/archaic, 2) local color/dialectal, and 3) ironic/pejorative/low style’ (Friedman, 1996, 137). Gruevska-Madžovska, of the Macedonian Language Institute, has claimed that wildly popular Turkish soap operas have ‘occupied’ [‘зaпoceднaa’] Macedonian television and caused ‘a mass use of Turkisms and calques from Turkish’ (Toevski, 2014).
Maretić’s influential approach to translating Homer, Ovid, and others can still be taken as paradigmatic here. While he translated into the language he called ‘Croatian or Serbian’ in the early twentieth century (he lived from 1854 to 1938), his ideas persisted into the time of the second (Communist) Yugoslavia (1945–1991), when Macedonian developed as a distinct, literary language, under a considerable influence of Serbo-Croatian. Translations of ancient poetry needed to be faithful and exact, in analogous meters, and purist in vocabulary (Jovanović, 2006, 47).
Ban and Matovac divide Croatian borrowings from Turkish into three groups: words fully absorbed into the standard (like budala and jastuk), words referring to realia from Turkish or Islamic civilizations (baklava, imam), and stylistically marked regionalisms. The third category occurs in ‘standard language only when something needs to be purposefully highlighted,’ for instance ‘when historical events are to be described and evoked’ (2012, 162–163).
This poem by Marulić and its English translation by Kovačićek can be found in Lučin (2007).
Ibrišimović-Šabić (2010) compares many aspects of Dizdar’s Stone Sleeper with the Russian literary avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century.
Purism, though historically not as strong in Macedonian as in Croatian (Čilaš, 2001, 292), is still present. Toevski’s report ends with an ambivalent stance on purism: on the one hand, it is rigid and prevents interaction between languages and cultures, but on the other, a number of countries have turned to it to protect themselves from overwhelming foreign linguistic influence (2014).
I use Morgan in the section of the essay on Mihajlovski to demonstrate how consistent or inconsistent the latter’s use of the former can be.
The OED defines gusle as follows: ‘A bowed stringed musical instrument found in the Balkans, usually having only a single string, and used chiefly to accompany and support the chanting of the epic poems of the southern Slavs’ (OED, s.v. ‘gusle’). The earliest attestation in English is from 1869.
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Ferhatović, D. Triumphs and challenges of two recent South Slavic Beowulfs. Postmedieval 8, 277–291 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0057-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0057-z