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ENTERTAINMENT AND EDUCATION THROUGH LITERARY TRANSLATION IN A DIASPORA NEWSPAPER: PROSVETA, A NEWSPAPER OF SLOVENE-AMERICAN ÉMIGRÉ COMMUNITY
N. Pokorn1, T. Pogacar2
1 Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana Askerceva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia 2 Department of World Languages and Cultures, College of Arts and Sciences, Bowling Green State University, 203 Shatzel Hall, 43403 Bowling Green, Ohio, U.S. Submitted on April 30, 2021 10.5922/2225-5346-2022-1-7
The main argument of the article is that literary translation assumed different roles in émigré periodicals: from serving educational purposes, through amplifying the diaspora's cultural identity, to providing entertainment to their readership, and that all these roles conformed to the political and ideological orientation and positioning of the newspaper and its editors. The article focuses on the newspaper Prosveta (The Enlightenment), a left-of-centre progressive newspaper published by the Slovene diaspora in the U. S., and the presence of literary translations in the period from its establishment in 1916 to 1933 when it began appearing only five days a week and its circulation began to fall. We analyzed 5273 issues of Prosveta, identified all literary translations, and classified them into three categories. The results show that the choice of authors whose works were translated and published in the newspaper reflects the ideological positioning of the editors and newspaper, and blurs the distinction between two categories of translated works: between the works selected for the education and those for the entertainment of Prosveta' s readership.
Keywords: literary translation, periodicals, diaspora, the interwar period, Slovene Americans
1. Introduction
In the period between the late 19th century and 1924, when the Immigration Act severely reduced the number of Eastern and Southern European immigrants allowed entry into the country, several hundred thousand people who spoke the Slovene language emigrated from Europe1 to the U.S. (Klemencic 2013). These Slovene speakers soon formed diaspora communities and strengthened the links between different settlements by means of periodical publications published in the Slovene language. A Catholic almanac published in Chicago reports that there were 18 Slovene newspapers and 4 almanacs published in the U. S. in 1927, each of them with a distinct
© Pokorn N., Pogacar T., 2022
1 Slovenes traditionally inhabit the territory south of the Alps in Europe. Today the Republic of Slovenia borders Austria to the north, Italy to the West, Croatia to the South and Hungary to the East. Slovenes speak a specific Slavonic language called Slovene. The first written documents in Slovene date from the 10th century. Today, Slovene is the official language in the Republic of Slovenia and one of the official languages of the EU.
CAoSo.py. 6aAmuuc%uu a^enm. 2022. T. 13, № 1. C. 115-128.
political, ideological or regional orientation: there existed a republican, liberal, socialist, communist, progressive (i.e., left-wing), politically independent, Catholic periodicals, and even periodicals targeting a group of Slovene speakers coming from the territory dominated by Hungary and using Hungarian spelling rules (e. g. Szlobodna Reics - Free Word) (Jeric 1927). Today, only one of these periodicals still exists: Prosveta - The Enlightenment, and this periodical is studied in this article.
The research presented in this article is a part of a wider research project that studies translation in different periodicals of the Slovene-American émigré community, and also in periodicals of other U. S. diasporas (see Baer and Pokorn 2018). Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of literary translations, we attempt to outline the way literary translation influenced the internal and external dialogics of different periodicals. The term dialog-ics is originally taken from Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of polyphony. Here it is used in its translatological adaptation by Tahir Gurçaglar. In her article "Periodical codes and translation" (2019) Tahir Gurçaglar uses the term internal dialogics to refer to the way translations impact the relationship between different components of the publication, and the term external dialogics to denote the discursive exchanges with a larger public sphere (see Tahir Gurçaglar 2019). In the case of Prosveta, we argue that literary translations were one of the mechanisms that influenced, in particular, the external dia-logics of the periodical and assumed different roles largely defined by its editors: some literary translations were geared towards raising the educational level of Prosveta's working-class readers; the English translations of Slovene classics were primarily intended for the creation of a specific cultural identity and were created for the new generations of Slovene-Americans who no longer read Slovene and for other diasporas and mainstream U. S. culture; and finally, the third group of literary translations aimed to provide entertainment to Prosveta's readership. We describe the first two roles (the educational and that of cultural-identity building) of literary translation in Prosveta elsewhere (Pogacar and Pokorn 2021; Baer and Pokorn 2018); here we will focus on the role of literary translations as a source of entertainment. We argue that even when literary translations were meant primarily to entertain the readers of Prosveta, they still served the political and ideological orientation and positioning of the newspaper and its editors.
After providing a brief review of literature on translations in periodicals and diaspora, we define our corpus and methodological approach. The results, discussion and conclusion follow, in which we focus in particular on the role of those literary translations that served mainly entertainment purposes.
2. Review of Literature
Translations in periodicals have gained an increased interest in Translation Studies of late: in 2019 a special issue of Translating and Interpreting Studies was dedicated to translation in periodical publications (Guzman 2019), and in 2020 a collected volume gathered sixteen articles on literary translations in periodicals, paying special attention to different methodological approaches (Folica, Roig-Sanz and Caristia 2020). Recently the newspaper Prosveta has also been studied more intensely: its transformation through time was presented by Pogacar (2017), and the literary works (including
translations) published on its pages were documented in one MA and four BA theses, all under the supervision of Professor Miran Hladnik, that covered the periods between 1916 and 1935 and between 1939 and 1943 (Oman 2015, Majdic 2016, Plantan 2018, Drozina 2020 and Mavrin 2020).
Translation activity by or for diaspora has been more overlooked in Translation Studies and the emerging Diaspora Studies (see e. g., Asscher 2021: 37), and even when it is studied, researchers tend to focus on cultural translation practiced by diaspora authors in their original writings (e. g. Baldo 2019, Steiner 2009). There are, however, some, notable exceptions: Baldo (2013) studies the specifics of translations of diasporic Italian Canadian writers into Italian, the language of their country of origin. More recently, Asscher argues that textual translation is a particularly useful tool to investigate homeland-diaspora ideological relations and calls for more case studies concentrating on the specificities of such relations (Asscher 2021: 45). Finally, as a part of a wider research project focusing on translations in émigré newspapers and other periodicals, Baer and Pokorn (2018) provide some preliminary results by focusing on the roles of translations in two periodicals of Slovene and Russian diasporas in the USA: the Slovene Prosveta and Russian Novoe Russkoe Slovo. The results show that the roles of translation in these two newspapers were different, reflecting the divergent political orientations of the newspapers and the distinct make-up of these immigrant communities. This article aims to provide more details regarding one of the roles of literary translation in Prosveta: that of entertainment. It is argued here that the choice of literary translations, even when they aimed to provide entertainment to the newspaper's readers, they nevertheless reflected the overall, progressive nature of the newspaper and blur the distinction between works selected for the education and those for the entertainment of Prosveta's readership.
3. Corpus and methodology 3.1. Corpus
The newspaper Prosveta was chosen for the analysis because it is the only newspaper of Slovene-American diaspora that has survived to the present time and because it was the newspaper with the widest circulation during its golden age, when it had between 3000 and 7000 subscribers. Prosveta was established in 1916 in Chicago by the Slovene National Benefit Society, a life insurance company and a fraternal benefit society offering affordable life insurance and disability coverage to members of Slovene émigré communi-ty.2 Its editors all came from the Slovene-American diaspora: Joze Zavertnik, Ivan Molek, Fran Kerze, Louis Beninger, Anton Garden, Andrej Kobal, and Milan Medvesek (Drozina 2020). The periodical was a progressive newspaper that was at first published as a Slovene-language daily, however, its format and language have changed throughout its history in line with the chan-
2 Slovene National Benefit Society website, https://snpj.org/ Accessed 28 April 2021.
ges of its target readers from the Slovene American diaspora. Today, it is published online once a month in English only3 (also Pogacar 2017: 343—44, Sed-mak 2004: 77, 78).
When Prosveta was published six days a week (all days but Sundays), it would typically consist of four pages. The first page was dedicated to international and national news, page two provided editorials, columns and news from different Slovene settlements in the U.S., and was thus key to the forming and imagined community of American Slovenes (Anderson 2006, Pogacar 2017). Page three brought news from the country of origin, which in the period from 1916 onwards belonged to different political structures: Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and socialist Yugoslavia. And the last page was dedicated to literature in original or in translation. Occasionally, some shorter literary works were also published on page two or three. Wednesday editions were longer (8 pages or more) since they provided reports on the functioning of the Slovene National Benefit Society and also gave space to numerous commercial advertisements. From 1926 the Wednesday editions included also the English supplement, called "Prosveta English Section", which provided information on different local lodges, invitations to various sports or cultural events organized by the Society, and occasionally also included English literary translations.
All issues of Prosveta (from 1916 to 2002, and from 2004 onwards) are archived in the Periodical Department of the Slovene National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and at the Slovene National Benefit Society's (SNJP) offices in Imperial, Pennsylvania (USA). In addition to that, all issues between 1916 and 1948 are available online on the Digital Library of Slovenia — dLib. si portal (http://www. dlib. si/) in a digitalized form in PDF format and as a TXT file.
All printed issues of Prosveta published between 1916 and 1961 were analyzed in the archives of the Periodical Department at the Slovene National and University Library in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and those between 1961 and 2020 at the archives of Slovene National Benefit Society in Imperial, Pennsylvania (USA) — in total more than 10,000 issues were surveyed. The paper version was preferred to other forms because the digitalized versions often proved to be too dark and therefore hard to read. In case some issues were missing in the archives or they were too brittle to handle, the online version or the versions available on the microfilm were checked.
The analysis of Prosveta revealed that translations of literary works were published on its pages from 1916 until 1979, with the majority of them being published before the Second World War. In this research, we focused on the period between 1916 and 1933, when Prosveta was at its peak and was still published as a daily.
3.2. Methodology
The research reported in this article is divided into two major parts: a quantitative analysis of the presence of literary translation in Prosveta between 1916 and 1933, and an analysis of the way these literary translations impacted
3 https://snpi.org/membership/prosveta-publication/ Accessed 28 April 2021. 118
Prosveta's external dialogics with a larger public sphere. First, all issues of Prosveta from 1916 to 1933 (i.e., 5273 issues) were surveyed to identify the presence of literary translation. Then a list of authors of these translations was made. The results were then cross-checked with the catalogues, available on Wikisource,4 and classified into three different categories.
Finally, the biographies of the editors Joze Zavertnik (the editor of Prosveta 1916 to 1929) and Ivan Molek (the editor of Prosveta from 1929 to 1944) and descriptions of editorial orientations were studied and compared to the list of translated literature published in Prosveta to see whether and to what extent the personal, political and ideological preferences of editors influenced the selection of translated works.
4. Results 4.1. Translations
Between 1916 and 1933 almost every issue of Prosveta printed at least one, but usually three literary works: some of them were originally written in Slovene, others were translations. We have identified all works published in the newspaper, where an individual work was counted as one item even if it was published in serialized instalments over a longer period of time (for example, Dostoevsky's Demons was published continuously throughout the years 1921 and 1922 but is counted as one item in our catalogue). In total, between 1916 and 1933, Prosveta published 3122 literary titles (see Fig.), and out of them more than half (51 %) were translations (n=1596).5 The newspaper published most of literary works in the period of four years between 1927 and 1930.
Number of literary works and literary translations published in Prosveta (1916-1933)
450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0
No of lit. works No of lit. transl.
i. I. I. I. I. i.
I IL
1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 92 7 5 33 11 13 5 4 57 115 193 150 226 362 425 348 408 225 219 116 16 23 12 5 7 2 5 2 7 21 102 49 108 196 264 209 246 111 115 60
Fig.
4 https://sl.wikisource.org/wiki/Prosveta Accessed 28 April 2021. The catalogues are one of the results of the work of graduates from the Department of Slovene Studies at the University of Ljubljana.
5 Most probably the actual figure is even higher — we have not counted in the category of translations also those literary works that were published anonymously or were written under a pseudonym or were attributed to the author we could not identify.
All identified literary translations were then classified into three categories: first, literary translations into English; second, literary translations into Slovene whose aim was to educate the readers; and third, literary translations into Slovene aiming at providing entertainment.
The vast majority of the literary translations were from different languages into Slovene; however, the newspaper also published translations from Slovene into English in the so-called English section, which was introduced in 1926. Between 1929 and 1933 Prosveta thus published six literary translations from Slovene into English: two short novels in instalments (Ivan Cankar's Yerney's Justice (1926) and Comedy of Justice (1926), and four short stories (Anton Novacan's "Comes and goes" (1927) and "A Village Cyrano" (1929), Zofka Kveder's "The Montenegrin Widow" (1927), and Ivan Cankar's "Discontent" (1929). These translations into English had a specific role: on one hand, they informed the new generations of Slovene diaspora in the U. S. that no longer read Slovene about Slovene culture and literature, and, on the other hand, they presented to the mainstream U. S. culture and other diasporas a facet of Slovene culture that in their mind represented their community at its best. This role is of literary translations is discussed elsewhere (see Baer and Pokorn 2018).
The Slovene literary translations we identified, however, revealed that their role followed the general orientation of the publication, which was defined by the editors and the publication's management in the first issue of Prosveta, which appeared on 1 July 1916. In a short editorial published on the first page, we read:
Prosveta will educate our working class in the progressive and modern spirit. There is a huge gap of ignorance, spiritual laziness and cultural backwardness among our people and a lot of work and effort will be needed to seal this gap. The sacred mission of Prosveta will be to endeavour to fill this gap.
Prosveta will of course provide to its readers the latest news about all-important world, American and domestic events: we will pay particular attention to original news from Slovene settlements. We will bring instructional, scientific and economic discussions along with the regular articles on everyday events, original stories and translations of good, modern writers, and from time to time also humorous writings to pass the time.6 (Prosveta 1916, 9/27: 1; 1 July 1916, all translations and emphases are by the authors)
According to this manifesto, we classified Slovene literary translations in Prosveta into two larger categories: a) translations for instruction and education, and b) translations for entertainment.
6 Prosveta bo izobrazevala nase delavstvo v naprednem in modernem duhu. Velika je se vrzel neznanja, dusevnega spanja in kulturne zaostalosti med nasim narodom in veliko bo se dela in truda, preden se ta vrzel zamasi. Sveta naloga Prosvete bo, da pomaga z vsemi mocmi, ki jih (sic!) bodo na razpoago, pri masenju te vrzeli. Prosveta bo seveda skrbela, da dobijo njeni citatelji vsak dan sveze novice o vseh vaz-nih, svetovnih, ameriskih in domacih dogodkih: zlasti bomo posvecali pozornost izvirnim porocilom iz slovenskih naselbin. Prinasali bomo poucne, znanstvene in gospodarske razprave poleg rednih clankov o vsakdanjih razmerah, izvirne povesti ali prevode dobrih, modernih pisateljev, in od casa do casa tudi humoristicne sestav-ke za kratek cas.
The instructional role of translations is particularly visible in a specific section that was introduced by the editors in 1927, called "The Gems of World Literature" ("Biseri iz svetovne literature"). To provide further education to its readers and to empower the working class,7 the section included critical introductions and short translations from the work of 31 authors from the Western literary canon, such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Giovanni Verga, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, J. W. Goethe and Gerhart Hauptmann, H. de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Jules Verne and Anatole France, Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving and Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. The section also provided brief introductions to the thought of selected philosophers and political thinkers, such as Francis Bacon, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Karl Marx. The selection of works and authors also reflects the ideological orientation of the journal and its editors (for more details see Pogacar and Pokorn 2021).
We classified all other literary translations as entertainment. This category included longer works published in instalments as well as shorter texts (often defined as humorous sketches or fairy tales). For example, between 1916 and 1933, Prosveta serialized 39 longer works: some of them were pub-licshed throughout two consecutive years (e.g. Dostoevsky's Demons, which appeared in more than 230 consecutive issues), for others, less than 10 instalments sufficed (e.g., Hanns Heinz Ewers' short stories). The works that were selected for serialized publication could be classified in five different sub-categories: the first group consisted of works taken from the great Western canon, for example, Henryk Sienkiewicz's With Fire and Sword (1918—1919)8 and The Deluge (1919—1920), Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons (1921 — 1922) and Crime and Punishment (1929), Leo Tolstoy's Confession (1927) and The Prisoner in the Caucasus (1928), Ivan Turgenev's "The Unhappy Girl" (1927), and Victor Hugo's play Lucrezia Borgia (1929). The second subcategory consisted of translations of more popular works; for example: R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island (1922), Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (1927), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1930), Alexandre Dumas, père, The Knight of the Red House (1921 — 1922) and The Wolf Leader (1928), and Jack London's The Sea-Wolf (1928 — 1929). In the third group, we classified the translations of novels with distinct political and social justice themes: such as Maxim Gorky's "Ninth of
7 Prosveta editors in the first issue stated this orientation very clearly. They wrote: "Prosveta will represent the rights and benefits of the working class. The editors are fully aware that Slovenes in America, with the exception of a few farmers and small traders, consist of a mass of salaried workers, and therefore our daily newspaper will intrepidly defend the interests of workers and fight without mercy against everything that opposes and threatens workers' interests." (Prosveta 1916, 9/27: 1) (Prosveta bo zastopala pravice in koristi delavstva. Urednistvo se zaveda v polni meri, da je slovenski narod v Ameriki razen piclega stevila farmerjev in malih trgov-cev — masa mezdnih delavcev, in zato bo nas dnevnik neustraseno zagovarjal interese delavske mase in se boril brez pardona proti vsemu, kar nasprotuje in skoduje de-lavskim interesom.)
8 The date in brackets indicates the publication date in Prosveta.
January" (1927), Upton Sinclair's Jimmy Higgins (1921) and 100 % - The Story of a Patriot (1932), Jack London's Iron Heel (1932—1933), and the Slovene translation of the work of American Slovene Louis Adamic Laughing in the Jungle (1933 — 1934). This sub-category also covers the translations of the works by Socialist writers (the Russian Lidiia Seifullina's Virineia (1931) and Leonhard Frank's "Oce" (Father, 1929) and "Vojna vdova" (War widow, 1930), and the translations of the works with an anti-clerical undertone (Le Grand Village by Edgar Monteil, 1918), a prominent freethinker and a Communard, Antonio Fogazzaro's The Saint (1926), in which the protagonist criticizes the Vatican, and Ernest Werner's At the Altar (1928), a novel set in a Benedictine monastery). The fourth sub-category of translations published in a serialized form consists of translations of historical novels, such as Vaclav Benes Trebizsky's Kraljica Dagmar (Queen Dagmar, 1918), Josip Evgen Tomic's Udovica (The widow, 1921), Prokop Chocholousek's Jug (The south, 1923), Gottfried Keller's Don Correa (1927), and Edwin Erich Dwinger's Between White and Red (1931). And finally, the fifth sub-category consisted of the translations of some Slavonic sentimental novels, such as Bozena Nem-cova's Grandmother (1922) and Ksaver Sandor Gjalski's Durdica Agiceva (1922), the adventure novel The Grand Duke's Finances by Frank Heller (1922), a satirical novel, Izlet gospoda Broucka v XV. stoletje (Mr. Broucek's excursion into the 15th century) by the Czech author Svatopluk Cech (1927), three fantasy stories from Hanns Heinz Ewers' collection Die Besessenen (The possessed, 1928, 1930), tales Dvonozec in druge zgodbe (The biped and other stories, 1922) by Karl Ewald, in which the Danish author attempted to explain scientific findings in a simple and humorous way, and travel fiction by Joseph Svatopluk Machar entitled Rim (Rome, 1926).
Eight of these novels were commissioned by and translated for Prosveta only (works by Lidiia Seifullina, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Ernest Werner, Leonhard Frank, Edwin Erich Dwinger, and one work by Upton Sinclair); others were published before in Europe and were reprinted in the newspaper (e. g., by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc.).
Every issue also contained a translation of one or two short stories. The authors whose short fiction was published in Prosveta more than ten times between 1916 and 1933 were: A. P. Chekhov (n=56), Mikhail Zoshchenko (n=54), Rabindranath Tagore (n = 38), Arkadii Averchenko (n=37), Maxim Gorky (n = 30), Mark Twain (n=25), Anatole France (n = 24), L.N. Tolstoy (n=21), O. Wilde (n = 20), Henri-Georges Jeanne (n = 13), Guy de Maupassant (n=12), Albert Jean (n = 12), Sandor Rosenfeld (n=11), and Maurice Renard (n=11).
4.2. The editors
In the period between 1916 and 1933, the newspaper Prosveta was edited by Joze (also Josip) Zavertnik (1869—1929) and Ivan Molek (1882—1962).
Zavertnik was born in 1869 near Ljubljana in the then Austria Hungary. He worked as a sailor and as a steam-engine stoker for the southern railway. When he was fired because of his social-democrat political views, he found a job as a collaborator and later as an editor of a railway workers' periodical in
Vienna and of a transport workers and craftsmen's periodical in Trieste. In 1898, he became the general editor of the Newspaper of Slovene Socialist Workers in Trieste and the Littoral Region. He emigrated to the U. S. in 1899, came home after a year, and then returned to the U. S. in 1903 and remained there until his death. He edited several left-wing periodicals before becoming the editor of the newspaper Glasilo SNPJ (The Herald of the Slovene National Benefit Society), the forerunner of Prosveta. When Glasilo was replaced by Prosveta, Zavertnik continued as its general editor until 1929, when he retired. A month later he died in Clarendon Hills near Chicago (Rozman 2013, Molek 1979).
From 1929 until 1944 the general editor of Prosveta was Ivan Molek. Molek was born near Metlika, near Slovene-Croatian national border in the then Austria Hungary. In 1900 he emigrated to the U. S., where he initially worked in Pennsylvania's steel works and mines. He soon became politically active and started editing left-wing, communist newspapers. He started working for Prosveta in 1916 and became its editor in 1929. Besides being an editor, Molek also wrote poems, prose, dramas, popular science text, and also translated. In his essays, such as "Proletarian ethics and morals" (Chicago, 1926), and his translations of works, such as John Keracher's How the Gods were Made (Chicago, 1926) or Frank Bohn's The Catholic Church and Socialism (Chicago, 1916), his socialist and propagandist views were made explicit (Pirjevec 2013). Pirjevec (ibid.) quotes Molek saying that he "wrote for propaganda and not for literary reasons". That is not to say Molek's writing was devoid of literary merit. One commentator describes it as "...forthright and vigorous. The action is fast moving and unhindered by description, and the language is terse, metaphoric and full of folk idioms. The words used are common place and often harsh and base. The protagonists are invariably the down-trodden and the destitute and those weakened by their own vices. Hence, the tone of the writing often appears pessimistic and depressingly gloomy" (Creber 1976: 5).
5. Discussion
Literary translations published between 1916 and 1933 in the progressive newspaper of Slovene American diaspora Prosveta represent an important if not even essential part of this periodical. Translations served several, complementary roles and influenced profoundly the external dialogics of the newspaper. The manifesto of the newspaper, published by its editors and the managers, in the first issue states that Prosveta will publish news from Slovene settlements in the U. S.: by doing that Prosveta attempted to unite its readers into a community, so that Slovene Americans were able to imagine themselves as a nation in the making (if we borrow Benedict Anderson's terms [Anderson 2006, Pogacar 2017]). In addition to the nation-building enterprise, the newspaper's manifesto states that Prosveta will entertain, and, last but not least, also attempt to instruct and educate the Slovene American diaspora that predominantly consisted at that time of members of the working class. They call this second aim their "sacred mission." Our analysis
of the literary translation in Prosveta shows that the editors of Prosveta attempted to reach the last two goals (of entertainment and that of instruction) partly, if not almost entirely, through Slovene literary translations.
The results of our analysis show that only a handful of literary translations published in Prosveta were explicitly presented as educational material: the series "Gems of World Literature" included the works of 31 authors, while the number of literary translations that were not explicitly defined as instructional is much higher and covers more than 1560 works. However, a closer look at this last group shows that many of the works reflect the worl-dview and political orientation of the publication's editors and may serve both aims: the entertainment and the instruction of its readers.
The biographies of the editors of Prosveta in the period between 1916 and 1933 showed that both of them were staunch socialists who devoted much of their life to socialist and anti-clerical propaganda. Their choice of literary translations of longer works published in instalments reflected their views: the prominence given to socialist, left-wing, anti-clerical authors, such as Maxim Gorky, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Louis Adamic, Lidiia Seifullina, Leonard Frank, Edgar Monteil and others, shows that even when literary translation was presented as a form of entertainment, it also served to promote socialist, progressive ideas. Similarly, the editors' choice of translations of shorter works was influenced by their political views and ideological positioning. Among the five most frequently published authors of short fiction in Prosveta between 1916 and 1933, are found two Soviet authors: in second place Mikhail Zoshchenko, with 54 translated works, and in fifth place Maxim Gorky, with 30 translated works.
6. Conclusion
In our article we have briefly outlined one of the roles of literary translation in a diaspora periodical, that of entertainment. Our initial assumption that literary translations published in Prosveta between 1916 and 1933 served different roles, and that these roles were interconnected, seemed to be correct. The literary translations in Prosveta that were presented as primarily a means of entertainment, nevertheless often served the political and ideological orientation and positioning of the newspaper and its editors as well. The editors of Prosveta wanted the literary translations published in their periodical to instruct, to entertain, and to contribute to cultural identity building, and consequently chose translated literary works that at the same time fulfilled more than one role and contributed to the complex internal and external dialogics of the periodical. It is our belief that this complexity of diaspora's translation activity, and in particular the role of translation in diaspora periodicals, which is at the moment under-studied in Translation Studies, should deserve more intense scholarly attention.
Acknowledgement
Nike K. Pokorn acknowledges the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. P6-0239).
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The authors
Dr Nike Pokorn, Professor of Translation Studies, Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID: org/0000-0002-2152-612X
Dr Timothy Pogacar, editor of the journal Slovene Studies, Associate Professor of Russian, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Bowling Green SU, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]
To cite this article:
Pokorn, N., Pogacar, T. 2022, Entertainment and education through literary translation in a diaspora newspaper. Literary translations in Prosveta, a newspaper of Slovene-American émigré community, Slovo.ru: baltic accent, Vol. 13, no. 1, p. 115 — 128. doi: 10.5922/2225-5346-2022-1-7.
■SUBMITTED FOR POSSIBLE OPEN ACCESS PUBLICATION UNDER THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION (CC BY) LICENSE (HTTP://CREATIVECOM MON S ORC/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)
РАЗВЛЕЧЕНИЕ И ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ ЧЕРЕЗ ЛИТЕРАТУРНЫЙ ПЕРЕВОД: «ПРОСВЕТА», ГАЗЕТА СЛОВЕНСКО-АМЕРИКАНСКОЙ ЭМИГРАНТСКОЙ ОБЩИНЫ
Н. Покорн1, Т. Погакар2
1 Кафедра перевода, факультет искусств, Люблянский университет Словения, 1000 Любляна, Аскерцева, 2 2 Кафедра мировых языков и культур, Колледж искусств и наук, Университет Боулинг — США, Огайо, 43403 Боулинг-Грин, Грин, 1 Поступила в редакцию 30.04.2021 г. аок 10.5922/2225-5346-2022-1-7
Основная идея статьи состоит в том, что литературный перевод использовался в различных целях в эмигрантских периодических изданиях - для образования, развлечения, а также укрепления культурной идентичности диаспоры. Эти функции литературного перевода соответствовали политической и идеологической ориентации и позиционированию газеты и ее редакторов. В статье анализируются литературные переводы, опубликованные в прогрессивной левоцентристской газете "Prosve-ta" (просвещение), издаваемой словенской диаспорой в США, с момента ее основания в 1916 году до 1933 года, когда она стала выходить лишь пять дней в неделю, а тираж
начал падать. Были проанализированы публикации в 5273 номерах газеты, выявлены тексты литературных переводов, которые были разделены на три основные категории. Результаты анализа показывают, что выбор авторов, чьи произведения были переведены и опубликованы, отражает идеологическое установки редакции и стирает различия между двумя категориями переводных произведений - теми, которые были отобраны для образования читателей "Prosveta", и теми, которые предназначались для их развлечения.
Ключевые слова: литературный перевод, периодические издания, диаспора, период между войнами, американцы словенского происхождения
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Об авторах
Д-р Найки Покорн, профессор, кафедра перевода, факультет искусств, Люблянский университет, Словения.
E-mail: [email protected]
ORCID: org/0000-0002-2152-612X
Д-р Тимоти Погакар, редактор журнала "Slovene Studies", доцент кафедры русского языка, факультет мировых языков и культур, Университет Боулинг Грин, США.
E-mail: [email protected]
Для цитирования:
Покорн Н., Погакар Т. Развлечение и образование через литературный перевод: «Просвета», газета словенско-американской эмигрантской общины // Сло-во.ру: балтийский акцент. 2022. Т. 13, № 1. С. 115—128. doi: 10.5922/2225-53462022-1-7.
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ЛИЦЕНЗИИ CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION (СС BY) (HTTP //CREATIVECOMMONS ORG/UCENSES/BY/4 О/)
