Harry Potter and the Serbian Oversell
There has always been a little anomaly in the Serbian translations: books 1 and 3-7 were translated by Draško and Vesna Roganović (a mother and son team) but 2 was translated by Ana Vukomanović. Odd, but not unheard of. However, I started seeing COS attributed to the Roganovićs… I added them to the translation on TheList and earmarked that for investigation.
I have been recently doing some cataloguing of books from COBISS1 and started looking at their COS holdings and started noticing some inconsistencies—the earliest COS books were attributed to Vukomanović, but from 2002 onwards they were attributed to the Roganovićs, with one very confusing record that has both and an interesting note:
Ana Vukomanović (translator)
Vesna Roganović (suspected author)
Draško Roganović (suspected author)
According to the CIP (Cataloging-in-Publication), the translators are: Vesna and Draško Roganović
Apparently “suspected author” (“сумњиви аутор”) is a common flag used when the attribution is not clear.
My guess was that it was simply a mistake—that the original cataloger accidentally added Vukomanović and it was never corrected. However, I am rarely satisfied without evidence so I tracked down Draško via his instagram @r0gan and asked for confirmation—the truth is so much better.
Serbia was part of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia2 which was under the authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milošević in 1999 and 2000 when Harry Potter was first being translated into Serbian. The country was in the grips of politic turmoil—NATO mounted a bombing campaign in 1999 in response to human rights abuses in Kosovo and civil unrest grew until Milošević was overthrown in October 2000. It was a critical period in the history of Serbia as its citizens began to transition from a dictatorship towards democracy amid the lingering consequences of war and an economy in shambles.
This was the backdrop of the first Harry Potter translations in Serbian: turmoil and chaos. Apparently two publishers simultaneously acquired the translation rights to Serbian—Narodna Knjiga who we know well, and Plato Publishing who we’ve never heard of. This was apparently a mistake made by J.K. Rowling’s representation, who at the time, was the Christopher Little Literary Agency.
When the conflict came finally came to light, it seems that the Roganovićs had completed their translation of PS and Vukomanović had completed both PS and COS. Negotiation ensued—we don’t know the details—and the compromise that the publishers came to was reportedly that the books would be “co-published” under Narodna Knjiga’s imprint (or perhaps Narodna Knjiga bought Vukomanović’s translations outright?) and that they would publish the Roganovićs’ PS and Vukomanović’s COS. So the first published COS translation was, in fact, by Ana Vukomanović.
Unfortunately, the publishers being business people, not writers and translators, did not edit either book to make the translations consistent—none of the vocabulary was the same between the two books and it was a bit of a disaster. Consequently, Narodna had the Roganovićs—who were already working on POA—retranslate COS from scratch. At some point—it’s not clear when—they cut over to the Roganović’s translation.
COBISS has three Cyrillic COS’s with unique IDs published in 2000 (although, I would take the date with a grain of salt), all ostensibly attributed to Vukomanović. I have seen photos of one of those books and the copyright page has the Roganovićs—the text itself also appears to be their translation.
So although Ana Vukomanović has long been known as the translator of Serbian COS, it’s entirely possible that no one has even seen her translation. And what of her PS? It was obviously shelved, never to see the light of day. And Ana herself appears to have no online presence to speak of—or at least if it’s there it isn’t associated with translation or Harry Potter and buried amongst the dozens of women that share her name. It appears in COBISS that COS was the only published translation she completed (although it’s possible that in 2012 she finished degree in math and published her dissertation).
Imagine how she must have felt when Narodna decided to go with the Roganovićs. It seems it may have been the end of her career as a translator!
- COBISS is an acronym for “Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services”—an originally Yugoslavian system for sharing and combining library catalogues that is now used by Slovenia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Serbia and Bulgaria. ↩︎
- Not to be confused with the former Yugoslavia that used to include Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia. ↩︎
