Bosnia and Herzegovina is an old country in which people have been creating their own unique language for centuries. Many nations live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but mostly Bosnians, Serbs and Croats. In 1995 the Dayton Agreement parted the country in two; since then the 49% of the country belong under the Republic of Serbia. The other 51% are inhabited by the Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Catholics and Bosnian members of the Orthodox Church - as they define themselves. Sarajevo, the capital city, is a conglomerate of various cultures and religions. The affirmation of the Bosnian language started after the long years of war. Before the World War I this language was almost abolished. Alija Isaković made an important move for the revitalization of the Bosnian language by writing Riječnik bosanskog jezika in order to help the others who want to research this language with a long history. Important poetry works describing the horrors of the war and the most basic human survival instinct were also written during this time. Sarajevski tabut, a poetry collection, was published in 1993 in Sarajevo. Poems that were written during the siege of Sarajevo are gathered in this collection. Here, for the first time, I was encountered with the problems of translation itself. How to translate poetry - for which many think is untranslatable due to its nature - without losing the essence of the poem, stresses, meter, style ... The translation cannot be literal, since the languages radically differ from one another. In the case of word-for-word translations poems are disfigured and their depth cannot be seen anymore. Poems cannot be translated just by sense - in this case we can witness predominant deviations that create an adaptation which no longer suits the original poem. The main focus of this thesis is the translation of words such as: tabut, eto/evo/eno, sehara etc., and some of more contemporary words.
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