Who is Afraid of Goran Vojnović?

Participants: Goran Vojnović, Anita Peti Stantić
Moderator: Doris Akrap

Summary: The Slovenian language knows no proper swear-words, we use mixed language which reflect mixed origins. How to translate this in other languages?

Description: For swear-words people in Slovenia use expressions from English and mostly from the Croatian or Serbian. Especially if their parents moved to Slovenia from one of the former Yugoslav republics. There exists a vivid mixture between Slovenian and these languages, which is widely spoken, but up until Goran Vojnović never used as a literary language. For his first novel, written in this mixed language which reflects mixed origins, he received the reward for the best novel of the year. This novel was translated into many languages and posed quite some challenges. How to call "čefurji" in other languages and how to swear? When this novel was translated to Croatian or to Serbian its language felt quite familiar to the readers. But when translated into Russian and Arabic, the text was censored for being too obscene.