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Posmehljivo poželenje

Deseo debochado

Slovenia

Drago Jančar

From this crevice of the world, everything disappeared into other spaces of memory, fleeting hopes and desires, fleeting lives, mother's, Ana's, his, everyone's, all people's.

When Gregor Gradnik goes on a one-year exchange as a creative writing teacher from Central European, recently communist Slovenia to America, his life is turned upside down. Not only because of the harsh American reality he faces in the hot carnival nights of New Orleans, not only because of the eccentricity of Professor Blaumann, who is writing a never-finished work on melancholy, not only because of the Americans who are so different from him, but also because of himself. In Gregor the writer and the human being, two worlds, two cultures and two languages clash.

Drago Jančar worked as a journalist, film playwright and editor. From 1987 to 1991 he was the president of the Slovenian PEN. During this time he contributed greatly to the democratization of Slovenia. He is considered the most translated and world-famous Slovenian writer.

His novels, short stories and plays have been translated into almost thirty languages. Some critics describe him as a “seismologist of chaotic history.” He has received a number of domestic and international awards, including the European Herder Prize for Literature (2003), the Jean Améry Prize at the Frankfurt Book Fair (2007), the Premio Hemingway in Lignano, Italy (2009), the Prix Européen de Littérature in Strasbourg (2011) and most recently the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger in Paris (2014), the award for the best foreign book for the novel To noč sem jo videl. Among the domestic awards, four notable ones are Zvenenje v glavi (1999), Katarina, pav in jezuit (2001) and To noč sem jo videl (That night I saw her), In ljubezen tudi (2018). Drago Jančar is also the recipient of the Prešeren Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Citizen of Europe Award 2015 and the prestigious Austrian State Prize for Foreign Literature (2020).

Translated by Thaís Caroline Schmitt Vrečko and Blažka Müller. The translation was into Portuguese.

Thaís Caroline Schmitt Vrečko

translator

Thaís Caroline Schmitt Vrečko is a Brazilian translator, born in 1981 in Blumenau, Brazil, to a family of German immigrants. She spent most of her life in Florianópolis, on the Atlantic coast, where she studied English language and literature at the Faculty of Arts of the State University of Santa Catarina. She graduated in 2007 and devoted herself to the profession of translator. She has translated a number of texts from English to Portuguese and from Slovenian to Portuguese. She is married to a Slovenian man and has lived in Maribor since 2008. With her enthusiasm, she soon integrated into the new environment and, with a passion for learning new languages, she soon added Slovenian to Portuguese, English and Italian, which she now writes, speaks and translates fluently.

Blažka Müller

translator

Blažka Müller is a lecturer in Portuguese at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, teaching modern Portuguese and literature in this language. She is also a TV presenter at Television Slovenia and a moderator of various events. For many years she danced in the Betontanc theatre group. She still works in theatre, now as a dramaturge and author of dramatisations. She is also a literary translator, having translated several works from Portuguese into Slovenian by Paulo Coelho, Lídia Jorge, the novel Budapest by Chico Buarque and some Portuguese and Brazilian poetry. Her main area of research is Portuguese and Spanish linguistics. As a lecturer at the Camões Institute in Lisbon, she co-designs and leads public cultural events related to the Lusophone language.