RENDERING PUNCTUATION: MILOŠ CRNJANSKI’S SEOBE IN MICHAEL HENRY HEIM’S TRANSLATION INTO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

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A signature feature of Miloš Crnjanski’s famous novel Seobe (Migrations), written in the Serbian language, is the author’s seemingly eccentric use of punctuation marks. Odd as it may seem, the paper maintains that such punctuation serves a literary purpose, as it reg- ulates the flow of narration and imposes a strict overall rhythm. Pre- serving the original punctuation becomes a major issue in translation, especially into English, owing to the discrepancy in morphosyntactic systems of the two languages. Michael Henry Heim’s translation of Seobe into English, entitled Migrations, does not follow the original punctuation pattern, thereby ignoring a series of wider implications of the syntactic, prosodic, and semantic kind. While calling for Seobe’s retranslation that would pay closer attention to Crnjanski’s punctua- tion, this paper argues that the key to the preservation of the novel’s distinct rhythm lies in keeping the however peculiar sentence struc- tures and accompanying punctuation – as long as the rules of stand- ardized grammars are respected.