Proleterka

Author: Fleur Jaeggy
Title: Proleterka
Original title: Proleterka
Translation: Alenka Jovanovski, Gašper Malej
Technical details: 14.6×20.9; 120 pages
ISBN: 978-961-7122-47-3

The book is designed in accordance with the criteria for designing materials for readers with dyslexia.

The story of Proleterka is told by an unnamed fifty-year-old woman who, after the death of her father, is remembering her youth: different periods of her childhood, her runaway and indifferent mother, her father, whom she rarely had the chance to see, her loneliness, her despondent and empty days at her grandmother’s house. She especially remembers her only cruise in the company of his estranged father, Johannes, on a Yugoslav cruise ship called Proleterka, on the route from Venice to Greece.

Fleur Jaeggy was born in 1940 to a Swiss father and an Italian mother. At the age of five, her parents sent her to a girls’ boarding school in Appenzell, from which she escaped at the age of seventeen. After a short stay in Locarno, she moved to Rome in 1968 and later to Milan, where her literary work began. Her last novella or a short novel, Proleterka (2001), was named the best book of 2003 by the Times Literary Supplement. In addition to novels and collections of short stories, she also wrote dramatic texts and translated into Italian. Under the pseudonym Carlotta Wieck, she also collaborated with the Italian musician Franco Battiato.

Alenka Jovanovski translates various texts (poetry, drama, short prose, novels, essays) from Italian and English. Since 2007, she has translated authors such as Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Nelida Milani, Lina Prosa, Claudio Povolo, Igiaba Scego, Audre Lorde, Kevin Barry, etc. Although she was a literary scholar at first, she left the academia in 2011. She is a poet with two published poetry collections. Her second poetry collection, One Thousand and Eighty Degrees, received the Veronika Award, the award for poetry collection of the year, awarded by the Municipality of Celje. Her poems have been translated into English, Polish, Spanish and Czech, and are also included in many anthologies.

Gašper Malej (1975) holds a degree in comparative literature. He has been self-employed in culture since 2004. He is the author of the poetry collections Otok, sultnje, poljub, Rezi v zlatem and Pod tisto celina (which will be published in Italian in 2023). He is particularly intensively engaged in translating from Italian literature (among others, authors such as I. Svevo, I. Calvino, P. P. Pasolini, D. Campana, A. Tabucchi, C. Pavese, D. Fo, C. Goldoni, E. Barba , P. V. Tondelli, P. Cappello, F. Berardi Bifo, F. T. Marinetti, R. Esposito, E. Erba, F. Buffoni, N. Milani …) and is one of the most established Slovenian literary translators of his generation; his translation work includes 34 books, ten staged theater texts and over 200 other publications. In May 2011, he received the Zlata ptica award for his translation of P. P. Pasolini’s novel Nafta; for his translation work he won the national translation award of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Italy as the only Slovenian translator so far. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages and published in several anthologies in Slovenia and abroad in 2016; he participated in several Slovenian and international literary festivals, tours, meetings and poetry-translation workshops, and was a guest of literary residencies several times.