John Donne in Slovenian and the 
“Reflexive” Translation Theory of 
Antoine Berman
John Stubbs
University of Ljubljana, Philosophy of Arts, Department of English and American Studies, Aškerčeva 
cesta 2, 1000 Ljubljana 
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3765-7334
johnanthony.stubbs@ff.uni-lj.si
In his last book, Antoine Berman developed his theory of “translation criticism” 
by considering the poetry of John Donne in French translation. The present 
article applies that theory to Slovenian translations of Donne by Janez Menart 
and Marjan Strojan. It makes particular use of Berman’s concept of “marked” 
textual features to consider the survival of Donne’s “far-fetched” stylistic devices in 
Menart’s and Strojan’s translations. The article suggests that translation critics 
outside the Slovenian milieu should be aware of the preconceptions fostered by 
the hierarchy of “high” and “low” impact cultures. Silvia Kadiu, commenting on 
Berman, stresses the importance of “reflexivity” on the part of literary translators. 
When, as translation critics, we consider these two translators’ place within 
Slovenian culture and investigate the critical erudition they display towards 
Donne’s historical milieu, we find that Strojan and Menart pay exceptional respect 
to the principle of reflexivity.
Keywords: literary translation / English poetry / Donne, John / Slovene translations / 
Menart, Janez / Strojan, Marjan / reflexivity
197
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 47.2 (2024)
The theorist Antoine Berman attempted to resolve the enduringly tricky 
question of how we should assess literary translation. Berman synthe­
sized his ideas in his last book, Towards a Translation Criticism: John 
Donne, and debated the success of a number of French translations of 
the infamously challenging English poet.1 My remarks here will apply 
Berman’s methods to another case study: translations of Donne in­
cluded in the Slovenian language anthology of English poetry edited 
by Marjan Strojan, which has become a standard reading text and ref­
erence work in Slovenia since it first appeared in 1997. The discussion 
1 For synopses of the book and summary of its place in Berman’s oeuvre, see Davis 
2013 and Berman’s translator’s introduction (Berman vii­xvii).
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will center on Berman’s conception of the textual features that transla­
tor and critic should determine as “marked.” The hierarchy of “high” 
as opposed to “low” impact cultures will prove to have a bearing here, 
one that Berman’s theory, while not explicitly acknowledging it, effec­
tively encompasses and counteracts. I will end by drawing on the work 
of Silvia Kadiu to support Berman’s suggestion that in certain circum­
stances we should understand translation itself as a “reflexive” act of 
criticism. The Slovenian language treatments of Donne by Strojan and 
Janez Menart, I will argue, fall under this category. 
***
The criticism of literary translation complicates the challenge posed in 
assessing any form of translation. The question is never merely “Does 
the translation get the message across?” but “are the literary merits of 
the translation adequate to convey the message?” and, of course, “what 
actually is the message?” 
For Antoine Berman, a distinguished specialist in the field, a con­
flict between schools of translation criticism exacerbates the problem. 
Some critics are loyal above all to the historical particularity of the 
original text as they perceive it. Berman is less than polite towards 
them. “Engagé” analyses, as he calls them, are all about denunciation; 
“denouncing,” moreover, “with precision.” They involve the “meticu­
lous tracking of the incoherencies, poor systematicity, and biases of 
the translators” (Berman 32–33). In contradistinction if not outright 
opposition to such readers are translation critics of what Berman calls 
the “Socio­critical” or “Tel Aviv” School. Such critics stress the “norms” 
translators follow and the cultural discourses in which they participate. 
Berman explains the “Tel Aviv” rationale as follows: “To analyze a 
translation without going back to the system of norms that shaped it, 
then to judge it on this basis [i.e. without considering the position 
and background of the translator], is thus absurd and unjust, since the 
translation could not be otherwise, and since, as an act of translation, 
it only had meaning insofar as it was an operation subjected to these 
norms.” (39) Berman as such is kinder, on the whole, to Tel Aviv critics 
of translation than their “engagé” counterparts, but he still finds their 
methods deficient. The “Tel Aviv” school would implicitly accept as 
translation anything that presents itself as translation. Berman sees this 
as an overture to bowdlerisation: translations can all too easily sacrifice 
challenging content (or passages that are merely “hard” to translate) to 
“the literary norms of the receptor culture” (43).
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199
The conflict between “engagé” and “socio­critical” analyses is a pain­
ful one for Berman because he deeply wishes to defend the integrity of 
translation, which is to say the literature of translation, as literary art in 
its own right. He stresses the “creative and autonomous role of transla­
tion in Western history” (Berman 39): it is for him a noble endeavor. 
He is unapologetic (and a tad provocative) in insisting on the Latinate 
and indeed essentially “Roman” nature of the discipline of translation 
(9–11); he claims that there would be no “space for colinguism” in “the 
West” without translated literature.
Berman develops the engagé / socio­critical distinction very much 
on his own terms, but parallels and precedents in the work of other 
theorists bear him out. Skopos theory offers a less idiosyncratic descrip­
tion of the competing traditions that can guide critics of translation. 
Some seek the freedom of the modes Katherine Reiß called “commu­
nicative” or “creative” translation; some will place a literary transla­
tor’s efforts against the standards required by “philological” transla­
tion (Reiß and Vermeer 124–125). Once all due distinctions are made, 
those categories fall in rather neatly with Berman’s schools of criticism: 
the engagé critics are natural allies of philologists while socio­critical 
“Tel Avivians” are likely to be patrons of creative­communicators.
These were rifts and torsions that Berman hoped to overcome. His 
own theory seeks to synthesize and to some extent reconcile the two 
approaches. The translation critic must be an elucidator as much as an 
evaluator; he (Berman and his translator use the masculine pronoun) 
must both study meticulously the key features and historical setting of 
the original (Berman 54–58), and consider the “position” and “prod­
uct” of the translator himself (58–62). With great care, the critic may 
then proceed to set up a “confrontation” of translation and original. 
In doing so, he must remain aware of factors that together comprise 
the translator’s “horizon.” The translator’s hermeneutic horizon, for 
Berman, who cites the “post­Heideggerian” tradition which developed 
the metaphor, is made up of “the set of linguistic, literary, cultural and 
historical parameters that “determine the ways of feeling, acting, and 
thinking of the translator” (63).
Berman resists what he calls the “infeudation” of literary translation 
to any particular school of theory that might “tell translation ‘what to 
do’”: he is against “traductologies” per se (Berman 53). Nevertheless, a 
“philological” or “engagé” priority, for him, does bind critic and trans­
lator alike: namely a strong working knowledge of the critical traditions 
that pertain to a given text. For Berman, marked features of a liter­
ary text are “those stylistic characteristics, whatever they may be, that 
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200
individuate the writing and the language of the original” (51); and yet, 
broad as their remit might seem, neither critic nor translator have com­
plete autonomy in deciding what the “marked” or salient features of 
the original work might be. Those features have already been “marked” 
by other hands, including, in some cases, the author’s. Berman approv­
ingly cites Chateaubriand resolving to surround himself “with all 
the disquisitions of the scholiasts” in order to translate Paradise Lost 
(Berman 52).
Still greater rigor is required, for Berman, on the part of the transla­
tion critic. The care he urges in this regard, Silvia Kadiu argues, stems 
from his sense that “reflexivity” is essential to good translation, a belief 
“that it is no longer possible to practice translation without reflecting 
on it” (Kadiu 97). Translation, for him, is a critical activity in itself. 
“Translation criticism” is as such an ambiguous term. It can denote 
either the criticism of literary translation or, in specific conditions, the 
criticism performed by literary translation. Since, in the former sense, 
it is in effect the “criticism of criticism” (98), Berman insists that good 
translation critics will always know more and see further than good 
translators. The critic’s readings should be “more connected, more sys­
tematic, than those of the translator” (Berman 54). With little hope of 
reaching that standard, I shall at least try to apply it to two Slovenian 
translators’ treatments of two poems by Donne.
***
“Marked” stylistic traits, for Berman, are by no means the most el­
egant or beautiful in a writer’s repertoire: they are the most “necessary” 
(Berman 55). Although Berman devotes almost half his book on trans­
lation criticism to the discussion of a single poem by Donne (Elegie 
XIX), he does not say a great deal about the history of reception that 
has enfolded and transmitted Donne’s poetry. By common consent, 
nevertheless, Donne’s poetic style is marked by a fascination for strik­
ing, yet often logically contrived and outlandish figures and construc­
tions. It arguably marks one of his chief contributions to the later sev­
enteenth­century tradition. As one recent authority observes: of other 
English “metaphysical” poets, often labelled members of a “school of 
Donne,” “it is traditionally said that the group was united by the use 
of far­fetched comparisons, or “conceits,” that drew attention to their 
own ingenuity—although this is more evidently a feature of Donne’s 
work than that of other members of the group” (Burrow). Partly on 
account of this predisposition (and partly due to Donne’s notorious 
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201
arcaneness), his friend Ben Jonson warned that Donne’s writing “for 
not being understood, would perish” (Jonson, “Conversations” 466, 
[187–188]). Modernist criticism of course demanded that we cher­
ish that preoccupation with what Jonson disapprovingly termed “far­
fetched descriptions” (Jonson, “Explorata” 427, [2197–2198]). In ei­
ther case, regardless of the critical view taken, “far­fetchedness” quali­
fies as a “marked” feature of a distinctive Donnean text.
The basic premise of Donne’s well known “Song” (“Goe, and catch 
a falling star”) is that it is easier to experience miracles than for honesty 
to prosper or a beautiful woman to be faithful. Here is a signal moment:
If thou beest borne to see strange sights,
Things invisible to see, 
Ride ten thousand daies and nights,
Till age snow white haires on thee. (Hayward 4)
There is broad agreement that Donne wrote for an extremely well 
read, rhetorically literate coterie readership, which encountered his 
secular poems in manuscript. Some if not all of his first readers will 
have identified the idea of age “snowing” white hair “on thee” with a 
Horatian metaphor, “the snows of the head” (“capitis nives”; Horace, 
Carmina, 4.13.12). Classical rhetoricians disapproved of such con­
trivances. Marcus Quintilian, the eminent Roman authority, singled 
out Horace’s trope as an example of questionable practice. It demon­
strated that metaphors could at times be “harsh” when “derived from 
distant resemblances” (Quintilian 435, note 22, vol. 3). Ben Jonson, 
who greatly admired Quintilian, echoed him directly when he declared 
that “metaphors farfet [far­fetched] hinder to be understood” (Jonson, 
“Explorata” 431, [2359–2360]). As I mentioned above, Jonson seems 
to have had constructs of this sort in mind when he worried that 
Donne’s work would perish “for not being understood.”
Donne, however, as so often, made this particular trope work: in his 
poem, unlike Horace’s, one does not think of dandruff. The odd tenor 
of the image fits well among the fabulous sights and outlandish events 
his listeners will need to experience before they meet a) “an honest 
mind” or b) a “woman true and fair,” even though “the snows of the 
head” are in themselves a commonplace phenomenon. Donne’s use of 
the idea moreover serves a further purpose, one that he may well have 
expected a rhetorically educated reader to spot. Some with Donne’s 
learning may have recalled the specific place where Quintilian gently 
chides Horace; some will merely have recognized that Donne’s use of 
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the trope went against ancient authority. This was the sort of thing one 
should not do, in poems or in letters or sermons or, for that matter, 
state documents: the blizzard of white hair advertises the writer’s affin­
ity for, and willingness to use, a class of devices that classically inspired 
teachers of rhetoric vigorously discouraged. From the viewpoint of 
intellectual history, it lends Donne’s writing a rebellious, almost dis­
dainfully learned quality, and further accentuates the wearily contemp­
tuous air of the “Song.” It is a tiny, yet telling indicator of his outlook, 
and possibly his status, among the Elizabethan and Jacobean avant­
garde. It is a feature “marked,” moreover, by Ben Jonson’s unmistak­
able disapproval. 2
Modern readers of Donne will, unless they have had some prior 
contact with Horace’s odes, remain entirely oblivious to this slight con­
textual tremor until and unless a footnote or some other expository 
guide informs them of it. The notion of age snowing white hairs accord­
ingly poses the translator a challenge. It would be all too easy to opt 
for a bland if clearer alternative such as “till old age makes your hair go 
white.” Here is Marjan Strojan’s translation of the passage:
Če čudés ti vid je dan,
glej nevidene reči,
jezdi tisoč dni in dan,
da lase Čas zasneži. (Strojan, Antologija 127–128)
(If sight of miracles is given to you,
See things never seen before,
Ride a thousand days and a day,
So that Time covers hairs with snow/
So that Time starts to snow hairs.)3
2 Marotti drew on prior manuscript scholarship to refine the coterie context and 
inspired many further studies; Pebworth is an early example. Ettenhuber offers a 
recent view of how knowledge of rhetorical convention guided both Donne and his 
readers (or listeners) in negotiating “far­fetched comparisons” (Ettenhuber 401). On 
the wider classical and early modern scepticism towards such devices, see Berry; Cooke 
222–225; Skinner 88. My doctoral topic some twenty years ago was the bearing of the 
far­fetched on Shakespeare; I remain grateful to my supervisors, Gavin Alexander and 
Colin Burrow, for their thoughts in this area as in others. I returned to the subject in 
publications on later figures and periods (e.g. Stubbs, Jonathan Swift 92–93).
3 Paul de Man warned mockingly of the dangers of translating translation (de Man 
35; commenting on Benjamin 81). I offer my back translations in a duly cautioned 
spirit of pragmatism, for readers unfamiliar with Slovenian.
John Stubbs:     John Donne in Slovenian and the “Reflexive” Translation Theory of Antoine Berman
203
Putting the translation alongside the original reveals a number of dis­
parities; not least a typological distinction between “Age” in Donne’s 
poem, and “Time” in Strojan’s reading. The “harsh” metaphor of age’s 
snow is notably present, however. Rather strikingly, Strojan uses the 
resources of Slovenian both to preserve the far­fetchedness of Donne’s 
image, and to soften it. As my (far from definitive) back translation 
indicates, the line concerned may be heard, and translated, two ways. 
The first sense of the verb zasnežiti recorded by SSKJ (the standard 
Slovenian dictionary), “to start to snow,” gives a line very close in­
deed to Donne’s.4 The second standard sense of the verb means to 
cover an object or surface with snow; if this is the active sense, we 
see the rider’s hair turning white under the snows of time. There is 
no Slovenian counterpart to “white” or “on thee” in Strojan’s reading. 
Donne’s image has as such acquired lapidary focus, a precision which 
some might feel in fact alters or intensifies it. It has also taken on a 
spiritual pathos that Donne’s text does not confer. The “snows of time” 
are invisible, figurative and defined only in their effects; a snow of white 
hair is, by comparison, wackily imaginable yet more than faintly ab­
surd. Both images are present in Strojan’s working of the line. Those 
who read Slovenian will also note that Strojan’s line also has a quite 
different phonic concentration and evenness to Donne’s; a smoothness 
maintained throughout the whole translation. I might (and I beg par­
don for the play on words) seem to be splitting hairs; but the auditory 
and illocutionary qualities of a poem in verse translation are naturally 
a vital aspect of its meaning—and I will return to that side of things 
towards the end.
Berman is in no doubt at all that such minutiae are crucial. He 
exhorts us to discover as much as we can about the translator in our 
attempts to explain such details. “We want to know if he has writ­
ten articles, studies, dissertations, monographs about the works he has 
translated and, finally, if he has written about his own practice as a 
translator, about the principles that guide it, about his translations and 
translation in general” (Berman 58). Most Slovenian readers of these 
pages will know of Marjan Strojan’s verse translations of Paradise Lost 
and The Canterbury Tales, and his credentials as an interpreter of the 
later medieval and early modern canon. Strojan (1949–) is a distin­
guished and prolific poet in his own right, and has had considerable 
4 I am reliably informed, moreover, that the SSKJ entry on zasnežiti does not 
entirely capture actual usage: most Slovenians would hear in this context a perfective 
verb lending an emphasis which perhaps only the future perfect can render in English: 
“Ride a thousand days and a day / So that time will have snowed grey hairs.” 
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204
influence on Slovenian literary culture beyond the sphere of translation 
alone. He has moreover spoken of translation as a “unique poetic act,” 
by which working poets in effect place their skills at the service of their 
text, but invariably transmit something of themselves to it (Bratož). 
He might seem, as such, very eligible for recruitment to the “cre­
ative” school that socio­critical Tel Avivians admire. With regard to 
Donne, however, engagé philologists should note that not long before 
his Antologija angleške poezije first appeared, Strojan published a schol­
arly yet very accessible short account of Donne and his work. Strojan’s 
article shows keen awareness of the erudition of Elizabethan­Jacobean 
literary circles and their familiarity with demanding forms such as the 
“artificial conceit” (Strojan, “John Donne” 7).
It seems reasonable to claim that, when translating Donne’s “Song,” 
Strojan decided that the line about snowy hair (or snowing hair, to be 
more precise) certainly mattered. The extent to which he was aware of 
the exact Horatian source is probably indeterminable; the notes to his 
translation of the “Song” ignore the line (Strojan, Antologija 685). Yet 
Strojan’s phrasing creates a double effect. Time starting to snow white 
hairs is a Donnean thought; time covering hairs with snow abides by a 
principle closer to Quintilian’s or Ben Jonson’s. In Strojan’s translation 
the image with which Donne transgressed the classical rule is present, 
and yet the rule itself is tacitly re­imposed.
Strojan’s decision to retain the image of snow is all the more striking 
if one considers details in the original he decided to exclude. The origi­
nal poem’s opening sardonically urges the listener to “Goe, and catch a 
falling star.” Strojan’s Poet instead says:
Daj, ujemi zvezdo v dlan (Strojan, Antologija 127)
(Go on, catch a star in the palm of your hand) 
Strojan’s opening imperative, daj, is untranslatable (literally, it means 
“give”), yet entirely idiomatic. An entirely Slovenian expressive choice 
has as such displaced Donne’s very characteristic, more than faintly 
sardonic “Go” (a literal rendering of which in Slovenian, pojdi, would 
sound most discouraging). More importantly still, a purist might argue, 
is that the glancing and uncatchable flash of Donne’s falling star disap­
pears altogether. Instead, and it would seem unaccountably, Strojan in­
troduces something of his own—the palm (“dlan”) of the star­catcher’s 
hand. Here Strojan has surely breached Berman’s rule about preserving 
salient features of the original. 
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205
That said, a larger, not quite literal parity between Donne’s line 
and Strojan’s is worth considering. Strojan knew, as Donne almost cer­
tainly did not, that although one might not catch a shooting star at 
any considerable altitude, it was quite possible to pick up and pocket a 
shard of meteorite.5 Plucking a fixed star out of the sky and holding it 
in one’s palm is obviously inconceivable, even though the thought of 
doing so is both vivid and compelling. Accordingly, the core principle 
of Donne’s line, namely an impossibility related to some direct inter­
vention in a matter of astronomy, remains intact.
Here one might say that Strojan follows a maxim laid down by 
another theorist of translation, indeed another eminent Slovenian 
practitioner with whom he worked closely. Recalling his first efforts 
at translating Chaucer at the age of eighteen, Strojan has spoken of 
the tutelage of Janez Menart (Crnović). Menart (1929–2004) was later 
Strojan’s fellow translator of Donne (among other English poets) for 
the 1997 anthology. Among Menart’s maxims for the translator of 
poetry was the following:
The translator is obliged to mediate between the poet and readers of the sec­
ond language. In doing so he will wish by all means to ensure that the reader of 
the translation will experience to the greatest possible extent the “same” feeling 
he would derive from the original, if he spoke the language in which the poem 
was first written (Menart, “O prevajanju” 666).
The philological / engagé traductologist would protest: yet the skopos 
for translation set out here is undoubtedly relevant to Strojan’s man­
agement of Donne’s “Song.” Although he cancels Donne’s falling star, 
Strojan surely preserves the dominant “feeling” of Donne’s poem—its 
incredulity about virtue, its challenge that the reader or listener per­
form the impossible. Indeed, there is possibly an overlap here between 
Berman’s theorising, “post­Heideggerean” approach to “marked” tex­
tual features and Menart’s lighter, aphoristic notion of “feeling.” My 
next concern will be the extent to which one of Menart’s anthology 
contributions manifests the same stylistic traits in Donne preserved by 
Strojan, as prescribed by Berman, and whether it follows his own self­
declared principle of translation.
***
5 The astronomical nature of shooting or falling stars was established by Giovanni 
Schiaparelli in 1862.
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If we consider Menart’s treatment of a poem to which Berman devotes 
a great deal of attention, Donne’s nineteenth “Elegie,” “To his Mistress 
Going to Bed,” few would find any loss of the original’s overwhelming, 
indeed provocative and controversial erotic charge. Consider the fol­
lowing lines, first in Donne:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new­found­land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man’d. (Hayward 96)
And in Menart’s version:
Naj blodijo mi roke gori, doli
in spredaj, še vmes dovoli!
O ti, Amerika! Naj te spoznam,
kraljestvo, varno le, če vladam sam!
(May my hands wander up, down, 
and in front; allow them to go between, as well!
O you, America! May I know you,
a kingdom, only safe if I rule it alone!)
The combination of carnal and imperialist imperatives—and the un­
certain irony that hovers over the latter—is still present. Significantly, 
however, Menart modulates the imperative voice heard through 
Donne’s imperious “Licence,” by using the third person with the par­
ticle naj to express a wish or “understated command” (“omiljen ukaz”; 
see SSKJ 1, a). Menart adds, and he takes away. The Slovenian verb 
“bloditi” (wander, stray) takes on a comic vagrancy here that Donne’s 
simple “go” doesn’t have. The geographical and suggestive particularity 
of Donne’s “Newfoundland” meanwhile, disappears.
There is much throughout the translation to satisfy les engagés, and 
much to vex them after second thoughts. Menart had reservations 
about the capacity of the Slovenian language to furnish cognates for 
archaic or recondite diction in pre­modern texts (Menart, “O preva­
janju” 668); yet he is never short of an equivalent, by necessity some­
what antiquated term for each of the various garments and accessories 
the poem’s “mistress” casts off. There are also moments when he suc­
ceeds in achieving a near­perfect literal rendering of an English line 
that is also wonderfully euphonious in Slovenian. “Tu, kjer je prst, pri­
tisnil bom svoj žig” (“Here, where my finger is, I shall set my stamp”) 
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207
is Menart’s treatment of Donne’s “Then where my hand is set, my seal 
shall be” (Strojan, Antologija 125; Hayward 97). The task of the transla­
tion critic involves weighing up the significance of Menart’s replacing 
Donne’s hand with just a finger, or making the first person “I” rather 
than “my seal” the active subject of the second clause.
Despite the closeness of translation, in letter and spirit, to the 
original, the shifts noted above indicate that the “feeling” of Menart’s 
translation differs quite strongly from Donne’s. A single finger of 
course suggests contact of a kind quite distinct from that which the 
entire, controlling hand of Donne’s Poet establishes. The formal “you” 
occurs throughout when Donne’s speaker addresses his “mistress” (as 
“madam,” moreover, in l.1); Menart’s Poet uses the informal Slovenian 
ti pronoun. Donne’s avoidance of his customary informal “thou” is 
distinctive if not exceptional amid his “love poetry,” and contributes to 
a disquieting quality in the original that Menart tries on the whole to 
subdue. There is little in Menart’s text of the provocative humor that 
emerges in Donne’s opening couplet:
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defie,
Until I labour, I in labour lie. (Hayward 96)
The speaker compares his frustration in waiting (for the “labour” of 
lovemaking) to the pangs of childbirth: a claim that would stir objec­
tions in any age. This is the first of a number of figurative gender ex­
changes that conclude with the Poet eventually comparing himself to 
a midwife. The figure doubtless qualifies as a “farfet metaphor” of the 
kind both Quintilian and Ben Jonson disliked (few women experienc­
ing parturition would compare the sensation to impatient sexual arous­
al). Menart, for his part, drops the idea of the male speaker’s imagined 
womb dilating.
Daj, pridi že, moč ne trpi čakanja,
napor nedela k delu me priganja. (Strojan, Antologija 124)
(Go on, come here, [my] strength can’t bear waiting, 
the strain of not working is pestering me to start work.)
Berman’s theory of translation criticism urges us to inquire why the 
translator might cancel such a salient point in the original. Given the 
control of idiom and undertone demonstrated elsewhere in the same 
translation, it is inconceivable that Menart missed the meaning of the 
English phrase “in labour.” He has substituted Donne’s anatomical 
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208
impossibility with an altogether much fainter paradox, “napor nede­
la”—the strain (or effort) of inactivity. He was possibly uncomfort­
able with the drastic if entirely figurative sexual transformation the line 
imagines, or indeed its incredible sexism. Much of the original, in lexis, 
structure and spirit is manifestly there in the Slovenian. The inflective 
echo of “labour” in Donne’s line survives in the recurrence of “delo” 
in Menart’s, although the precise figurative form of the original disap­
pears.6 Similarly, Menart’s “Daj, pridi že,” carries a remarkably exact 
prosodic echo of Donne’s “Come, Madam, come.” Notwithstanding 
such fidelity, the outlandishness—indeed, the outrageousness—of the 
original opening has disappeared. Perhaps Menart felt that the poem 
could do without it; perhaps he felt it was in poor taste. Certainly, he 
rejected any option that might have compromised the idiomatic clar­
ity of his own Slovenian line or the smooth rhyme of his couplet. For 
whatever reason, he has applied a Jonsonian principle and cancelled a 
far­fetched figure: in effect, he has edited Donne’s poem. In doing so, 
unlike Strojan in his handling of the “falling star,” Menart broke his 
own rule. He manifestly did not preserve the “feeling” of the original.
In fact, as we have seen, Menart has made somewhat free with his 
text overall; he has softened its pungent, radical humour, introduced 
an air of genuine intimacy that the original arguably lacks, and made 
it resemble the “poem of love, joy and nudity” that Berman, for one, 
believed it to be (Berman 13).7 The question is, should he be applauded 
or reprimanded for doing so; or, to put it in less “engagé” terms, how 
should we—we trainee translation critics—explain the changes Menart 
chose or was led to make? 
Berman’s ideas would to some extent rescue Menart’s translation 
from a blunt verdict that the translator “got things wrong”. Yet there is 
something else present, on the hermeneutical horizon, as it were, that 
even Berman does not consider: namely the possibility that Menart did 
not feel he was getting things wrong but that he was putting certain 
things right, and that he felt entitled to do so.
Another factor affecting discussion of the success or otherwise of 
such a translation is the sort of translation culture to which it belongs. 
Theorists define national or regional literary cultures as “low” or 
6 Donne’s device is an example of antanaclasis, the repetition of a word (here, 
“labour”) with a change of meaning in the second instance.
7 I first encountered Menart’s version of the elegie when the late Uroš Mozetič 
read it aloud at a literary event in Ljubljana: I was immediately struck by it as an 
undoubtedly brilliant poem—but one quite different to the Donnean text. Menart’s 
performance is a poem of love; Donne’s is not. 
John Stubbs:     John Donne in Slovenian and the “Reflexive” Translation Theory of Antoine Berman
209
“high” impact: as Martina Ožbot explains in a recent collection of 
papers, Slovenian works routinely fall under the latter category, and 
the imbalance is equally felt in the sphere of translation. Addressing 
trends in that sphere, Ožbot works with the longstanding linguis­
tic distinction between “foreignization” and “domestication.” She 
considers, for instance, an Italian version of Miroslav Košuta’s poem 
“Daljava” (“Distance”) (Ožbot 34) as an example of how Italian trans­
lation very often “domesticates” Slovenian­language structures and 
idioms with forms that better suit Italian. The English­Slovenian con­
text obviously offers no direct parallel to the cultural locus of Western 
Slovenia and North­East Italy that Ožbot approaches. A number of 
principles she summarizes do however apply: there is a basic tendency 
for “central cultures,” notably, “to be more self­focused, while periph­
eral cultures may be more open to the Other” (86). Among the trends 
such openness displays in the practice of translation is a greater will­
ingness within “peripheral” cultures to sacrifice the target language’s 
idiomatic norms for the sake of preserving characteristics of the source 
text. As Ožbot puts it: “In Slovenian target texts, foreignization is 
often encountered, especially at the level of lexis, and appropriation of 
source elements is a common characteristic of literary texts translated 
into Slovenian.” (87) 
Foreignizing their language in this way was an accommodation that 
both Menart and Strojan were patently unwilling to make. At signif­
icant moments, indeed, they pointedly resist the prevailing trend of 
central­peripheral relationships. Ožbot, guided by the work of Itamar 
Even­Zohar, observes that such practice, in emphasizing “acceptabil­
ity” (to the target culture) is more typical of translators working within 
central cultures. Peripheral cultures typically place more stress on the 
“adequacy” or accuracy of translation (Ožbot  86). Menart and Strojan 
appear to have challenged this unwritten arrangement. How and why 
they did so merits further scrutiny.
***
Berman, to his credit, would urge us to go “in search of the translator” 
(Berman 57) regardless of the language group to which “he” belongs, 
peripheral or central (or median): and when we do so we learn that 
Menart, like his younger colleague Strojan, was a distinguished and 
prolific translator of medieval and early modern literature. On further 
investigation it also transpires that Menart, a figure proverbially “born 
for success” (Glavan), was and remains highly regarded in Slovenia for 
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
210
his own poetry as well as his translations. He was a major figure within 
the country’s postwar milieu.8
Menart’s intermittently “editorial” approach to Elegie XIX can be 
better understood when we consider the sort of poet he was. Unlike 
Donne, Menart’s diction and figurative language exhibit a preference 
for the fecund minimum. Like Jonson, whom he clearly admired, he 
seems to have felt that a composition “hath blood and juice, when the 
words are proper and apt, their sound sweet, and the phrase neat and 
picked” (Jonson, “Explorata” 436, [2570–2573]). Menart’s Slovenian 
diction could be extremely rich, yet he obeyed a strikingly strict 
Elizabethan rule of aptness: his poetry displays none of Donne’s taste 
for cryptic extravaganzas. It could, nevertheless, be distinctly “meta­
physical,” as in one of his most famous short lyrics, “Jaz” (“I” or “Self”) 
(first published in 1953):
Pred ogledalom nem stojim
in tujca pred seboj strmim.
Kot da zrem prvič ta obraz,
vprašujem ga: Si ti res jaz?
Zamišljeno me zro oči
in vprašajo: Sem jaz res ti?
In trezno pravi mu moj jaz:
Jaz nisem ti, ti nisi jaz;
jaz sem le jaz, ki se mi zdi,
in ti si jaz le za ljudi;
a pravi jaz je dan za dnem
uganka meni in ljudem. (Menart, Stihi 8)
(I stand mute before the mirror
And stare at the stranger in front of me.
As if beholding that face for the first time,
I ask it: Are you really I?
Thoughtfully its eyes gaze on me,
And ask me, am I really you?
8 For testimony to Menart’s standing, see e.g. Mejak 317–319; Jenuš; Zlobec; Žerdin. 
John Stubbs:     John Donne in Slovenian and the “Reflexive” Translation Theory of Antoine Berman
211
And, thinking straight,9 my self tells it,
I am not you, you are not I,
I am just I as I seem to myself,
And you are I only for others.
But the real I is, day after day,
A riddle to myself and other people.)
My back translation can of course capture nothing of Menart’s versa­
tile simplicity, nor of the rich shifts of sense he creates from the rep­
etition of small, everyday words, nor his carefree exploitation of the 
morphological resources of the Slovenian language in his discovery of 
rhyme. At moments, equally, the rhyme belongs in the nursery, con­
sisting of no more than a straightforward joining of nominative nouns. 
Jaz in Slovenian is both the first person subject pronoun and the word 
for the self, and the unity of the self as such is split between those 
senses as well as between the poles of gazer and reflection; belying the 
complexity it stirs, the word rhymes crisply with obraz, the word for 
face. Conceptually, the poem strands its speaker in a perpetual feed­
back loop of perception and reflection; yet, simultaneously, it provides 
gnomic closure to satisfy any child committing it to memory. For it 
is a child’s poem: a striking and accessible Slovenian treatment of the 
mirror phase published long before Slavoj Žižek got anywhere near 
that subject. To a student of Menart’s translation of Shakespeare, the 
poem also offers a magical antidote to the pain of Sonnet 62, to which 
its vocabulary presents compelling parallels. Within the parameters of 
seventeenth century stylistics, its “neat and picked” use of form and 
diction are much more reminiscent of George Herbert, that avid stu­
dent of Jonson, than of Donne. 
The poetic mode displayed here is equally evident in Menart’s prac­
tice as translator. His writing manifests what one could call a Jonsonian 
or, more strictly speaking, a neo­classical poetic; he applied the same 
principles to Donne’s text—for its own good, as Jonson would have 
said. Those principles emerge throughout Menart’s treatment of the 
elegie: in his redacting the strange idea of a man being in labor, or 
replacing Donne’s rough possessive hand with a single, more sensitized 
finger. One might well disagree with Menart’s choice, in cancelling the 
9 “Collectedly” might be a better translation here of “trezno” (literally, “soberly”). 
Amid the post­war existential agonies over human identity, Menart’s “self ” keeps a 
cool head—even while professing itself to be a fragmentary enigma.
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
212
distinctive, zany moment of Donnean inaptness which the opening 
couplet of Elegie XIX comprises, but it would be unwise to discount it 
or class it as an error of translation. The harshest words, moreover, are 
likely to arise from within the translator’s own milieu: a scholarly and 
principled yet misguided critique, for example, reprimanded Menart 
for apparent inaccuracies in his early verse translation of Shakespeare’s 
Sonnets (see Grosman).10 I suggest that we refer the matter to another 
standard invoked by Antoine Berman.
***
The larger point to be made with regard to “translation criticism” hing­
es on one of Berman’s central tenets: translation should be a “reflexive” 
exercise. For Berman, translation is reflexive when it constitutes an act 
of criticism in its own right. In Silvia Kadiu’s summary, he believed 
that “the critical nature of translational reflexivity is realized in the pro­
cess of translation itself” (Kadiu 96).
If translators are to be credited as critics, a question of authority 
arises. The status of translators depends on their status within and the 
scale of their contribution to their own culture; it also depends on the 
status of that culture itself within an international hierarchy. Some lan­
guages may “domesticate” others, and others may not. Apparent diver­
gences from the original in a translation by Seamus Heaney or Robert 
Lowell are likely to gain recognition as creative, interpretive or critical 
acts. Within the Slovenian milieu, clued­in readers are able to accept 
Menart’s translations in the same spirit. They know and, generally 
speaking, revere his style, and they can recognize his hand (or finger) in 
the text of his translation. This is to say that they will see that Menart’s 
treatment of a poem by Shakespeare or Donne represents a synthesis of 
his learning and his own capacities and instincts as a poet. His profile 
and back catalogue in fact reinforce awareness of the cultural contin­
gency of his translation. To those unacquainted with Menart’s “low 
impact” cultural setting, his apparent amendments of Donne are more 
likely to seem errors.
Kadiu warns us that the principle of reflexivity is always at risk of being 
lost in such situations. “Reflexivity in research,” she tells us, “is built on 
an acknowledgement of the historical and ideological pressures form­
ing researcher and researched alike” (Kadiu 14). Within the parameters 
of Berman’s theory of translation criticism, this means that the critic 
10 I discuss the critical debate between Grosman and Menart in Stubbs, “Shake­
speare’s Sonnets.”
John Stubbs:     John Donne in Slovenian and the “Reflexive” Translation Theory of Antoine Berman
213
must be open about “his” hermeneutical horizons while attempting to 
delineate the horizons of author and translator. Reflexivity should be 
more than a mere profession of faith in and adherence to the principle 
itself, or a superficially self­relativizing statement of intent: “no amount 
of highlighting, pointing or self­awareness can ensure an ethical prac­
tice of translation” (145). Kadiu voices deconstructive pessimism about 
language’s ability to perform what it preaches, or find oneness with the 
Other it purports to signify. True reflexivity, she suggests, lies within 
the stylistic “play” of the translation itself and any critical appraisal of 
it; and even then, manifests itself as an absence rather than a presence, 
“at moments of hesitancy, ambiguity and opacity” (145).
For Kadiu, reflexivity is primarily a safeguard against the distortion 
of “minor” by “dominant” cultures. Without reflexivity, the outcome 
is invariably translation Kadiu finds unethical. “The main idea under­
lying this line of thought,” she explains, “is that, in order to highlight 
manipulation (such as a stereotypical representation of the source cul­
ture), research must itself be reflexive and think about the conditions 
of its own emergence.” (Kadiu 14)
The loss of reflexivity is surely a bad thing, at the level of practice or 
theory, with respect to “minor” and “dominant” cultures alike. How, 
then, are we to understand the loss in translation—Menart’s appar­
ent deletion—of a crucial feature such as Donne’s idea of being “in 
labour” at the outset of Elegie XIX? Is Strojan’s cancellation of Donne’s 
image of a falling star, in the famous “Song,” another unwarranted 
intervention? Their apparent un­reflexiveness would be all the more 
grievous, at such moments, since a resounding quality in their man­
ner of translation is its confidence—a notable lack of the “hesitancy” 
Kadiu sees as a hallmark of reflexivity. Instead of hesitancy, Menart 
and Strojan offer critical erudition. We (as translation critics) should 
approach their work as Tel Avivians but with the philological equip­
ment of the engagé scholar. If we consider Menart’s version of Elegie 
XIX in the light of a discussion of his own poem, “Jaz,” the stylis­
tic harmony between the two is self­evident; and the relationship is a 
reflexive one. The poetic that guides Menart in handling Donne’s verse 
is plain to see. The shared affinity for difficult speculation, yet with an 
aversion to spiky, far­fetched conceptualization and a tacit dislike of 
Donne’s sardonic, often rather unkind manner is manifest in the rhym­
ing tetrameters, dating back to the 1950s, which I considered above. 
Our assessment of Menart’s achievement as translator in short depends 
on whether translation critics bother to investigate his own creative 
literary achievement. This is by no means tantamount to licensing a 
PKn, letnik 47, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2024
214
bowdlerised or sketchy translation: no one can seriously suggest that 
Menart has offered a slapdash or approximate realization of the elegie. 
Nor did he approach the exercise by imposing an utterly alien aesthetic 
on his text. He did not, for instance, turn Donne’s stanzas and couplets 
into unrhymed free verse, and thereby pre­emptively silence engagé 
quibbles with an implied “take it or leave it.” Both Strojan and Menart’s 
choice of Donne, and their management of his thought, his diction and 
his rhythms, reflect a profound involvement with the stylistic values 
that shaped his work. Those values influenced their own practice as 
poets; their translation of Donne is a profession of that involvement. As 
poets, nevertheless, both translators are closer to Jonson than to Donne 
himself. They admit as such—reflexively rather than directly—in their 
treatment of Donne’s approach to form.
Jonson, in his signature fashion, declared “that Donne, for not keep­
ing of accent [i.e., for his disregard of prosodic rules], deserved hang­
ing” (Jonson, “Conversations” 462, [42]). Both Strojan and Menart 
rejected this “marked” stylistic trait, and opted to present a distinctly 
mellifluous, metrical Donne to their Slovenian readership. A glance 
back at the stanza quoted earlier from Donne’s “Song” will illustrate 
the point. The jagged cadence of Donne’s line, “Till age snow white 
haires on thee,” is unrecognizable in the sibilant, suggestive smooth­
ness of Strojan’s rendering: “Da lase Čas zasneži.” The shade of Jonson 
would commend Strojan here; as would that of Pope, who “versified” 
(that is, rewrote) Donne’s second and fourth satires. Eliot, who praised 
the rhythms of real speech he found in Donne’s metrical irregularity, 
might disapprove, though I cannot see him faulting Strojan’s craft.
The translator of Donne’s poetry would be in a terrible position 
were it not that the arguments over Donne’s treatment of “accent,” 
insofar as translation is concerned, effectively cancel one another out. 
To reproduce intentional discordancy in the original when translating 
poetry is, if not impossible, then at least a risky policy to pursue (except 
in obvious instances of, for instance, burlesque); the target language 
readership will almost certainly interpret prosodic irregularity as a fail­
ure on the part of the translator. In the case of Donne, however, the 
translator is spared: attempting to replicate the liberties Donne took 
with “accent” would be redundant and self­defeating. For by a para­
dox almost worthy of the poet himself the polarity between the critics 
and defenders of his prosody proves to be an artificial one. Ultimately, 
like East and West, the two schools meet: the early twentieth­century 
champions of the Donnean mode argue that he actually did “keep 
accent.” Eliot or F.R. Leavis would merely maintain that he did so by 
John Stubbs:     John Donne in Slovenian and the “Reflexive” Translation Theory of Antoine Berman
215
observing principles of euphony to which Ben Jonson and the neoclas­
sical tradition could never subscribe.11 Instead of striving to emulate 
Donne’s hanging offence, Menart and Strojan chose the wise course of 
using their own strengths as versifiers in serving Donne’s text. Where 
their translation seems to edit and amend that text, it is reflexive, which 
is to say open, about the operative system of values that guides such 
amendments. Their insistence on euphony, on “keeping of accent” in 
Slovenian, is a sustained expression of that system.
Accordingly, Menart and Strojan succeeded in “domesticating” 
Donne; they made his original uncannily present in their translation, 
yet captured it within an idiom that is unmistakably Slovenian. They 
did so, nevertheless, by applying a literary standard that was present in, 
and characteristic of, the culture Donne addressed. In the Slovenian 
translations considered here, Donne has been judged and, in places, 
reformed—but according to laws that his ghost might recognize from 
his own time, and his own land. An “ethical” act of translation criti­
cism, by Antoine Berman’s standards, has been performed.12
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Zohn, Schocken, 2007, pp. 69–82. 
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Massardier­Kenney, The Kent State University Press, 2009.
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“The Good Morrow”: the moment is representative of Donne’s “consummate control 
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12 Many friends and colleagues have helped me in my work on Slovenian transla­
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John Donne v slovenščini in »refleksivna« 
prevodna teorija Antoina Bermana
Ključne besede: literarno prevajanje / angleška poezija / Donne, John / slovenski 
prevodi / Menart, Janez / Strojan, Marjan / refleksivnost 
Antoine Berman je v svoji zadnji knjigi predstavil teorijo »prevodne kritike« 
prek obravnavanja poezije Johna Donna v francoskem prevodu. Ta članek 
omenjeno teorijo aplicira na slovenske prevode Donna, ki sta jih napra­
vila Janez Menart in Marjan Strojan. Še zlasti se opira na Bermanov kon­
cept »zaznamovanih« besedilnih značilnosti in z njim obravnava ohranjanje 
Donnovih »daljnosežnih« slogovnih sredstev v Menartovem in Strojanovem 
prevodu. Razprava kaže, da bi se morali prevajalski kritiki zunaj slovenskega 
okolja zavedati predsodkov, ki jih spodbuja hierarhija med »visokimi« in »niz­
kimi« kulturami vpliva. Silvia Kadiu v komentarju k Bermanovi teoriji pou­
darja pomen »refleksivnosti« literarnih prevajalcev. Ko kot prevajalski kritiki 
razmišljamo o mestu teh dveh prevajalcev v slovenski kulturi in preiskujemo 
kritično erudicijo, ki jo izkazujeta do Donnovega zgodovinskega okolja, lahko 
ugotovimo, da Strojan in Menart izjemno spoštujeta načelo refleksivnosti.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK  821.111.09-1Donne J.:81‘255.4“163.6“ 
81'25
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v47.i2.11