摘要
The paper deals with the image of English, i.e., the way the English were represented, the country and the people, in translations of the poetry of major English Romantic poets into the Serbo-Croatian language, the official language of former Yugoslavia： Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. The first translation of an English Romantic poem was published in 1831 at the time when Yugoslav peoples were split under foreign governments of Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and later, during the twentieth century, they were healing the wounds of the two world wars. The English were seen, or wanted to be seen as liberal, rebellious, ready to die for the just cause, through the verses of their major Romantic poets; in both centuries, some of them seemed apposite for translation while encouraging national liberation spirit and social justice, patriotism, and some were read in that key despite the original, thanks to translators＇ efforts to make it look that way. Translators were not solely guided by the assessment of the source culture readership and critics, but by the needs of the target culture too. As a result of such tendencies of adjusting Romantics to national purpose, Byron＇s satirical works remained completely neglected, Wordsworth was primarily seen as a poet of nature, and Coleridge＇s irrational visions were inappropriate for the 20th century dominant communist doctrine relying on rational, material rather than spiritual; Shelley＇s longer poems were not translated in its entirety, only its excerpts, explicitly emphasizing liberty and equality.
