The Last Temptation of Sergij

Zadnja Sergijeva skušnjava

Slovenia

Since returning to Slovenia, he has had a more or less constant feeling that he is floating in a numb, sticky feeling, unable to really touch things.

Sergijevo smešnjava is a transitional novel set in the period after Slovenia gained independence in 1991. Contrary to the expectations of the intellectual elite and ordinary citizens, the birth pangs of the emerging state were so intense and unpredictable that, instead of a quick path to an orderly society and the elimination of everything that was bad in the former common state of Yugoslavia, they threw numerous obstacles, traps and detours on this path, which instead of the expected promised land led to a swamp of bizarre, grotesque, perverted reality.

The main protagonist of the novel, a young journalist Jošt Rowenski, wants to write a portrait of Sergije Tramar, an intellectual in his mature years, who in the seventies and eighties was one of the pillars of the Slovenian opposition and one of those intellectuals who co-created the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere from which the social changes that marked the break with the common state and the one-party communist system were driven. However, contrary to expectations, the story of Sergiu does not develop as a story about a heroic actor of some origin, but becomes a story about the miserable destruction of ideals.

Translator: Tom Micheal Sidney Priestly Translation into English.

Tom Micheal Sidney Priestly

translator

Tom Michael Sydney Priestly was born in Uganda in 1937, grew up in England and has lived in Canada since 1966. He studied at Cambridge (MA, 1965) and at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where he received his PhD in 1972. He is Professor Emeritus of Russian and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Alberta. His special research interest is Slovene sociolinguistics; since 1978 he has worked in the village of Sele in Austrian Carinthia. He has published more than 90 research papers. Since 1989 he has been translating Slovene literature, especially the poetry of Frantz Balantič, Maja Haderlap, Kajetan Kovič, Cvetka Lipuš and (together with Henry R. Cooper) Frantz Prešeren.

Margaret Peggy Reid

translator

Margaret Peggy Reid has worked as a lecturer in English at the University of St Cyril and Methodius in Skopje since 1969. She has proofread numerous literary works - plays, poetry and novels, among others. She is the recipient of the Struga Poetry Evenings prize for translation into a foreign language. In 1994 she was awarded the Macedonian Society of Literary Translators Award; twice won first prize for her poetry at the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival in the UK, and a certificate from Queen Elizabeth II for services to Macedonian literature and culture.