The Avant-Garde in Translation: Women Translators and Their Translations of Russian and Anglo-American Avant-Garde Poetry in the 1920s Serbia/Yugoslavia

Abstract

This paper is focused on literary translations — the most marginalized (women’s) activity in the Serbian and Yugoslav literary field. Some of the possibilities that were of utmost importance for women writers and translators in Serbia/Yugoslavia took place in the early 1920s, almost exclusively in the context of (literary) magazines marked by modernist and/or avant-garde tendencies. Bearing this in mind, as well as referring to the existing feminist research of the Interwar literature and (women’s and feminist) periodicals, the present author decided to look for all the translations of avant-garde/modernist fiction made by women during the 1920s and published in various periodicals in Serbia/Yugoslavia. The research was conducted regardless of the languages, sexes or nationalities of the authors of the translated works of fiction. When the first phase of the research was over, it became clear that, as one might have expected, there were not that many translations that corresponded to this description. What was not so easily predictable, however, was the fact that the women translators in the (early) 1920s, for the most part, used to choose poems written by women authors, either in Russian or English (more precisely, published in Russia or USA). This insight was precious because it confirmed some of the findings, previously made by feminist literary researchers in Serbia, regarding the phenomenon which can be named The two faces of avant-garde and/or modernism (of course, those two faces, second of which is gynocentric and actually the only one truly marginalised, are highly related to the concept of the second sex/gender).This paper consists of brief introductory and concluding remarks, which offer some crucial insights regarding the literary-historical context in which the study has been conducted, as well as remarks regarding the poetics and politics of translation of modernist/avant-garde fiction by women (writers) in 1920s. The chosen authors/translators are Milica Kostić Selem, Marina Potocka, Isidora Sekulić and Jela Spiridonović Savić. The central part of the paper is dedicated to the close analysis and interpretation of their translations of modernist/avant-garde poetry. It also sheds a new light on the work of the aforementioned women authors, as well as of the authors of the poems they chose to translate into Serbian. One of the most important conclusions is that those translations were indeed avant-garde (in the corresponding context of the literary field) per se, and this paper aims to explain why and how this happened.