Mladobosanka: Zdenka Marjanović’s Translations and Criticism in the Context of the Young Bosnian Literary Avant-Garde

Abstract

Zdenka Marjanović’s translation and criticism in the Bosanska vila [Bosnian Faerie] literary magazine (1909, 1911–1912) is presented for the first time in this paper, in which we point to its compatibility with the avant-garde literary program of Young Bosnia. Zdenka Marjanović was the first non-anonymous translator of Walt Whitman in the Serbo-Croatian-speaking area (1909). Translating Whitman and contemporary proto-expressionist German lyric poetry, Strindberg and Maeterlinck, Zdenka Marjanović moved in a rarefied circle of authors and poetics that Dimitrije Mitrinović and Young Bosnians promoted at the same time in Bosanska vila and other periodicals. She is also the author of one of the earliest, most comprehensive and undoubtedly the most affirmative critical article on Italian Futurism in South Slavic literature, published in the period between the first, predominantly informative wave of reception of Futurism (1909/1910), and the peak that reception reached in the two final years before the outbreak of World War I. In contrast to the usual attitude of Young Bosnians, Zdenka Marjanović approaches Italian Futurism with genuine sympathy. In the final part of her article, she spontaneously switches from a critical-analytical style to a stylistically-rhetorically recognizable discourse of avant-garde manifestos. Although her focus was on the innovative moments that the Young Bosnians introduced into the literary field, in most cases, actually preceded their interventions, Zdenka Marjanović remained mainly outside the mainstream literary-historical narrative about Young Bosnia and/as the pre-war literary avant-garde. In the paper, therefore, we outline the discursive practices of literary historiography that lead to such marginalisation, as well as the repercussions this has on understanding the typology and dynamics of historical avant-gardes in South Slavic areas.