Ivo Andrić Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Munir Sendich

Critical Essay by Munir Sendich

SOURCE: Sendich, Munir. “English Translations of Ivo Andrić's Travnička Hronika.” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40, nos. 3-4 (September-December 1998): 379-400.

In the following essay, Sendich provides a point-by-point comparison of all of the English translations of Travnička hronika.

I.

Criticism of English translations of Ivo Andrić's Travnička hronika is confined to a small number of reviews and occasional comments in periodicals praising the first two translations for their fidelity to the original.¹ Kenneth Johnstone's The Bosnian Story (1958), as the first English version of Andrić's masterpiece was titled, had generally been regarded superior to John Hitrec's later Bosnian Chronicle (1963). Yet some American critics, notably professional Slavists, preferred Hitrec's translation for having masterfully captured the “cadenced flow of the original” and for preserving “a marvelous tapestry of Turkish Bosnia.”² The novel's latest translation, The Days of the Consuls (1992), done by Celia Hawkesworth, likewise failed to...
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