The article examines the reception of Giorgio Bassani’s works in Slovenia. The current state of translations of Bassani’s works into Slovene is characteristic of the availability of Slovene editions ...of Italian authors, which often seems desultory despite the relatively high number of literary translations from Italian published after World War II. In the past, the translations were typically published later than the original texts and without a global strategy. This situation partly persists to the present day: whilst the translations of some authors are sufficiently present, others continue to be absent, which is probably due to the limitations of the Slovene book market. As few as three of Bassani’s texts have been translated into Slovene, namely the novel Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1978), translated by Stabej, excerpts from the short story Una lapide in via Mazzini (1994), translated by Ožbot, and a selection of poems from In rima e senza (2008), translated by Dekleva. Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, the only text to have been translated in an unabridged version, was also the subject of linguistic research by Miklič and Premrl. Whilst no doubt interesting for specialists, the results of their research most likely did not reach a wider public. Even though the translation of Bassani’s novel was followed by the release of the film adaptation, whilst the poetry collection received critical acclaim, Bassani remains a relatively little-known author in Slovenia to this day. Moreover, as many as thirteen years have passed since the publication of the last translation.
At the beginning of her writing career, in the 1930's and 40's, Pearl S. Buck achieved great success that reached its pinnacle with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938. Her works were ad mired ...among readers around the world, including Slovene readers. It seems that the Slovenes did not lag behind the world's literary trends of the time. The first translation of The Good Earth, probably the writer's most prominent novel, in 1934- only three years after the original was writ ten. The subject matter that the writer introduced in her works, China in interaction with the West, attracted many readers and soon resulted in a number of works being translated into Slovene. Con sequently the amount of critical material in Slovene newspapers and magazines also began to rise. This article provides an overview of and assesses the Slovene critical material on Pearl S. Buck, while evaluating the literary quality of that material.
The aim of this article is to study the translation of Polish literature into Slovene to shed light on Polish literary (and cultural) diplomacy in Slovenia. Being acquainted with the culture of ...another nation is an important factor in forming closer political and economic relations, since literature is a source of “soft power,” which relies on attraction rather than on the power of explicit or implicit coercion. Using quantitative analysis, we surveyed how many and which works were translated from Polish into Slovene between 1865 and 2021. Our qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews with Slovene translators further explores who chose the texts and decided what to translate from Polish into Slovene. The key finding of the article is that strong cultural cooperation (in our case, translation of Polish literature into Slovene) can be an advantageous platform for enhancing and strengthening political and economic relations between the two countries, as well as for fostering better understanding between the two nations.
In Steinbeck's novels set in the Great Depression and dealing with the agricultural labour scene, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), dialect and slang ...alternate with passages composed in Standard English. While this combination of languages represents a unique challenge to a skilful translator, it seems to have had the least satisfactory reconstruction in most Slovene editions of Steinbeck's works. The dilemma of how to preserve the coarseness of diction of Steinbeck's impulsive and almost illiterate protagonists without affecting the poetics and emotional richness of the narrative is particularly relevant in translating the novel Of Mice and Men (1937). The book consists mainly of dialogue that reveals the writer's intimate knowledge of the language spoken by the protagonists, uneducated migrant ranch workers. Taking up Gideon Toury's proposal to analyse a translation in terms of its adequacy in relation to the source text and its acceptability to the target audience, this article aims to establish whether the Slovene translators of these novels achieved a balance between domestication and foreignisation translation strategies. In particular, it aims to illustrate how they understood and transposed various stylistic markers (colloquial diction, repetitions) from the source to the target texts. The first part will provide a brief overview of Slovene translations; the second part will focus on the recent translation of Of Mice and Men.
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