Daniel Baric

Senior Fellow in the cluster European literatures and their interrelationships

Yugoslavia as translational history: envisioning, editing, and globalizing South Slavic literatures. 

The research design seeks to map the variety of projections about the fate of Yugoslavia as reflected by the work of translators, especially those engaged in literary texts. Translation is understood in this project in its material, intellectual, literary, and potentially political dimensions: the place of production and publication, as well as reprints and comments, as part of an information preparing the reception. 

The project develops in twofold parts, before and after the foundation of Yugoslavia, through two case studies. The first part looks at how an academic context of Indology, Indo-European, Greek and Slavic studies in the late Habsburg Empire shaped an orientalist scheme in the reception of a canonical work of Montenegrin/Serbian/Yugoslav heritage, The Mountain Wreath [Petar P. Njegoš, Gorski Vijenac, 1849] in its first German translation. The second part examines the historical depth of Hellenism, that is the quest for a modern Homer, as the background of international scholarship in the field of Bosnian/South-Slavic/Balkan oral literature in the interwar period. The question of translation is addressed in both cases as a reflection on how a multinational state was projected from outside and inside by the way of producing and commenting translations.