Self-Translating from Serbo-Croatian in a Post-Yugoslav Context: The Case of Lana Bastašić’s Catch the Rabbit (2021)

World literary studies pays a lot of attention to translation, but far less to the marginal practice of self-translation. Similarly, post-Yugoslav literature is usually construed as anything, but a literature written in Serbo-Croatian, since its emergence was predicated on the disappearance of both the country and the language. Starting from this double absence, this article investigates the self-translation of Lana Bastašić’s novel Catch the Rabbit (2021), originally published in Serbo-Croatian in 2018, from both a translational and literary sociological perspective. I argue that, while the choice to self-translate into English may function as a self-promotion strategy that reinforces the hyper-central position of English, the very act of translating Serbo-Croatian—and the multilingualism embedded in the text—has an opposite function: it reveals a de-hierarchization of languages, one that is grounded in a (reverse) exoticization, through which both the dominated language (Serbo-Croatian) and dominant languages (English, French, and German) are rendered simultaneously estranged and intelligible.