Translating the Poetry of Desanka Maksimović from Serbian into English

The aim of this paper is to describe and investigate five English translations of the Serbian poem Krvava bajka, written by Desanka Maksimović. The paper consists of three parts. Part 1 introduces the scope, theoretical framework and corpus-based data. Furthermore, the author surveys current research on translation process in general and poetry translation in particular. Additionally, in this part of the study, the author summarises certain tenets of diverse poetics types pertinent to the subject, namely, Generative poetics, Mathematical poetics, Structuralist poetics. My analysis is also based on Relevance Theory, more precisely, relevance-theoretic approach to cognition. Pragmatically-based approach to translation is also included in the pertinent analysis. Part 2 is the analysis of five translations of the poem Krvava bajka. This part analyses a number of cases in Serbian-English translations in order to illustrate mostly lexical-pragmatic processes employed by five translators. At the same time, in this part, we explore certain implications of relevance-theoretic approach to poetry translation. Some translators have applied the pragmatically-based approach to translation in order to solve coding-inferential challenges posed by the target language. The analysed translational equivalents illustrate a number of lexical- pragmatic processes of what is encoded and what is actually communicated by the poet Desanka Maksimović. Part 3 lists the most relevant findings, discusses the applicability of the employed theoretical models, and provides concluding remarks