The aim of this work is to show how agents in translation, including translators, publishers and critics, manifest themselves in different translations of Machiavelli's masterpiece The Prince into Serbo-Croatian. Our corpus includes the following translations published in the Serbo-Croatian-speaking area: Vladalac by Miodrag T. Risti & cacute; (1907), Knez by Filip M. Dominikovi & cacute;(1918), Vladar by Ivo Frange & scaron; (1952), Vladalac by Jugana Stojanovi & cacute; (1976) and Vladalac by Jelena Todorovi & cacute; (2009). We focused on the translator as the main translation agent and his/her (in)visibility in their work through the analysis of paratextual elements such as prefaces, afterwords and comments in translations, illustrating thus the presence of each individual translator in the target text and their attitude towards their predecessors. The concept of translator's agency represents an important concept in the field of Retranslation Studies, a special branch of the Translation Studies which is focused exactly on the phenomenon of different translations of the same source text in order to answer multiple questions about the nature of the retranslated texts, and the reasons for the retranslations, both of a linguistic and extralinguistic nature. We also wanted to point out how publishers, as translation agents with specially adopted publishing policies, influenced the "revival" of translations through various new editions and how they inspired new life in translations that, in their complementarity and supplementarity, form a unique corpus of all the translations of The Prince in the target culture. This paper underlines the necessity of the practice of retranslating the classics, and the need to pay due attention to the translated literature and the translators' profession as well, in today's publishing system, driven predominantly by principles of commercialization and market globalization. Translation as manipulation (Lefever 1992) includes a whole range of factors that should be considered because in new translations, in addition to the translator (and retranslator), a large variety of other voices can be heard: those of agents, publishers, auditors, or critics (Alvstad & Assis Rosa 2015: 12). These influences are sometimes more visible in the text, sometimes in its paratextual material. Translator's agency implies a translation intention that is always collective, determined by language, literary canons, translation traditions and the institutions in which the translation was created. In addition to this institutional and social dimension of agency, Venuti recognizes both the psychological and subconscious motives of translators' individuality because "translation always occurs in conditions remaining subconscious or subliminal, if not quite unconscious" (Venuti 2004: 30). The essential concept in Translators Studies is the one of the translator's visibility or invisibility, given the fact that his/her voice is always recognized as a voice of the author, never as a voice of the translator, and not even as a hybrid one (Venuti 1995: 238). The field of the Retranslation Studies is therefore ideal to research the (in)visibility of the translator, because the comparison of the similarity and differences of several voices provides a wealth of information on individual, unconscious translation motives, as well as on the norms and ideologies that inevitably modulate the translator's voice. When it comes to a new translation, the translator's agency is significantly increased because of theirs self-awareness and consciousness of creating a rival translation because "the retranslator's intention is to interpret the source text according to a different set of values so as to bring about a new and different reception for that text in the translating culture "(Venuti 2004: 29). Unlike previous practice when the previous translator was not mentioned in the new translation, today a new translator is "visible" in both their comments and prefaces, which is certainly a good way to draw readers attention at the practice of retranslation and translation in general (Fusco 2015: 119). The visibility of the second translator is actually affected by the visibility of the first one. In this paper, we also addressed the question of the visibility or invisibility of the translator primarily in terms of paratextual elements, i.e., the texts that accompany the basic text, such as the introduction, the translator's remarks, prefaces, or afterwords, because of the visibility of translation agents in these textual elements. All the listed elements significantly influence the ideological marking of the text and the adoption of appropriate reading strategies, influencing simultaneously the reception of the work in the target culture through the selection of a specific translation approach. The analysis of this paratextual material is an important methodological instrument in the examination of retranslations because it allows us to investigate the fact that in the practice of retranslations, the ways and meanings of the paratext are constantly changing, depending on the period, culture, genre, author, work or edition (Genette, 1987: 3). All these elements offer potential insights into the dynamic interrelation between multiple target texts and their constant evolution in a sociocultural context (Dean, 2011: 67). Miodrag Risti & cacute; was the author of the first Serbian complete translation of The Prince in 1907. The translator's preface is abundant in data about previous translations (although they have been lost and are now unavailable). Firstly, Risti & cacute; briefly informs us about the history of the reading and interpretation of Machiavelli giving advice to consult "the excellent book by Slobodan Jovanovi & cacute;", a well-known Serbian historian, as an obligatory reading companion to The Prince. As far as the paratextual elements are concerned, they are present both in the text and in footnotes: the translator specifies what could be insufficiently clear in the text itself. In three footnotes, he gives translations of the original phrases in Latin. Up until today, the translation of Miodrag Risti & cacute; remains the translation with the most re-editions. The Catalogue of the National Library of Serbia provides the data on the following years after the first edition from 1907: 1931, 1964, 1982, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2016, 2019, 2016, 2018 and 2019 (each of these editions were published in several series). The translation by Filip M. Dominikovi & cacute; was published in Croatian in 1918, before the end of the First World War, in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The translation contained a Preface by the famous Italianist Vinko Lozovina, the author of the first book in Croatia dedicated to Machiavelli, entitled Machiavelli and his Political Science (1928). The paratextual material contains the famous Essay of Tomas Babington Macaulay, the English historian who saw in Machiavelli "the Apostol of freedom in the time of romanticism" (Grubi & scaron;a 2018: 10). This translation is highly imbued with patriotism. This is the only edition of this translation that was not followed by other revised editions. The translation by the renowned Italianist, historian and literary critic Ivo Frange & scaron; was published in 1952 with the title Vladar (The Ruler). This translation was a translation into Serbo-Croatian and as such was present on the book market, as well as the translation of his predecessor. In his annotations, Frange & scaron; informs us about the translation by Dominikovi & cacute; and afterwards he explicates his own translational principles saying that he aimed to facilitate the reading and to translate into a modern language by breaking syntax and maintaining specific terminology from literary Croatian (1952: 123). Frange & scaron; acted not only as a translator but also as the author of the essay Machiavelli and Machiavellianism. When it comes to other paratextual elements, Frange & scaron;, as the author of the Comments, assumes full responsibility of the inner text, i.e. the footnotes. Vladar has imposed itself as the only official translation into Croatian, having been republished on a very regular basis. Most certainly, the explanation for such an achievement lies in the fact that Frange & scaron; concentrated various skills in one individual: the ones of a translator, a linguist, a historian and a literary critic as well as an expert in the Italian historical and political context. This translation was republished afterwards in the capital edition of Machiavelli's Selected Works, printed in 1985 in Zagreb and then in 1998, as a bilingual edition (in Italian and Croatian). Jugana Stojanovi & cacute; was the author of the third Serbo-Croation translation of The Prince which was published in 1976. This translation had a large number of re-editions by various publishers, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2016, and therefore coexisted with the translation of Miodrag Risti & cacute;. A part from the first edition that was accompanied by Preface written by Stojanovi & cacute; herself further editions lack of any paratextual material. The third translation into Serbian, and the fifth in the former Yugoslavia and the current Serbia, was published in 2009. The translator was Jelena Todorovi & cacute;. This translation was republished in 2013, 2017, 2018 and in 2021 which is a significant number of re-editions for a relatively recent translation. The author of the paratextual material is different from the translator and publisher (Dragan D. Laki & cacute;evi & cacute;, a philosopher and theoretician of politics and society). Other comments (mostly explanations in the footnotes) are provided by the translator. The paratextual material of the latest translation (following the previous covert translation) restore to The Prince its historical and theoretical importance by giving it the appropriate paratextual framework. Based on our research of the paratextual elements we argue in the conclusion of our paper that Miodrag Ristic had an accurate approach and philological respect for the text and that therefore he can be considered an invisible translator, given his strategy of not intervening in the body of translation nor in the paratextual elements. The translations by Risti & cacute; and Dominikovi & cacute; are two completely different translations: the first one speaks with a moderate and objective voice while the other one uses the voice of a prophet. We can certainly agree that the historical reasons strongly influenced such patriotism in Dominikovi & cacute;'s paratextual approach; but of course, we cannot exclude both psychological and subconscious influences. Dominikovi & cacute; provided a strong ideological, patriotic and national framing for his translation and thus he sentenced his translation to complete invisibility due to the archaic language and to a negative assessment of his successors and critics. As for the third translation, Frange & scaron; takes full responsibility for his work: he is also the author of the paratextual elements, prefaces and essays about Machiavelli. Such a scientific approach is completely different than that of both his predecessor, certainly from Dominikovi & cacute; and his patriotic and nationalist approach, and partially also from Risti & cacute;, who appears as the "invisible" translator in the paratextual elements. Jugana Stojanovi & cacute;, as far as her translation strategy is concerned, addresses mainly to readers who want "information" about Machiavelli's masterpiece and the source of the most famous of Machiavelli's maxims and proverbs. Based on the basic division into two types of translations, overt and covert translation, this translation places itself in the category of overt translations because "the original is tied in a specific manner to the source language community and its culture, and is often specifically directed at source culture addressees but at the same time points beyond the source language community because it is, independent of its source language origin, also of potential general human interest" (Haus 2009: 54). The translators Jugana Stojanovi & cacute; and Jelena Todorovi & cacute; do not mention their predecessors. It may be possible to "justify" the first one with the fact that at the moment of the publishing of her translation the issue of retranslations was not a subject of more profound analysis within Translation Studies, but the importance and significance of this work should have been enough to impose the issue of its retranslations. On the other hand, her strategy as the invisible translator has been certainly influenced by her status of a renowned translator in the target culture. The covert approach of Jelena Todorovi & cacute;toward her predecessors can be interpreted as a publisher's unwillingness to define this translation as a "rival" , but also as a sign of the status of this work in the target culture: therefore The Prince is not perceived as a translation, but as part of the target culture. This translation does not keep a line of continuity with its predecessors and the reasons might lie in both the translator's and publisher's ignorance of the phenomenon of retranslations. Therefore the opportunity to reach positive commercial results by promoting the "new translation" of such a masterpiece has been missed. All our findings demonstrate the importance of translation agents as key factors that strongly influence the life and the durability of literary masterpieces in the target culture.
