The Politics of Translation in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1952

The chapter focuses on translation policy in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1952 and shows us how these policies evolved along with the country’s relationship with the Soviet Union. In the immediate post-war years, the interventionist role of the Party in Yugoslav cultural life reflected the Soviet obsession with cultural politics as a central element in the ideologicaltransformation of the people. In the field of translation this took the shape of banned foreign authors and texts, quotas, and lists of ideologically approved authors who were to be translated; a list which drew mainly on Soviet socialist realism and other Russian and Slavic authors. Despite the lack of an official system of censorship, strict control over the publishing of translations was exercised via the capillary action of the Agitprop network which controlled all aspects of cultural life. Following the rift with the Soviet Union in 1948 there were significant changes in Yugoslavia’s cultural and translation policies. The Agitprop network was gradually dismantled and the level of control over translation decreased drastically. This opened the gates to a flood of literary translations from Western authors who had previously been banned and contributed to the creation of an ‘alternative modernity’, in opposition to socialist realism. Anticipating the development of the Yugoslav ‘third way’, translation became the intermediate space for ‘new voices, new cultural models and new visons of the world’, bridging the gap between the East and the West.