Аленка Корон

The present contribution addresses the question of how the novel Necropolis (1967) by Boris Pahor, a Slovenian minority author (with Italian citizenship) born in 1913 and living in Trieste, is placed in world literature. It sheds light on the novel’s path from the semi-peripheral Slovenian literary system to the canonical works of Slovenian (national) literature via various actors in the informal social networks of the globalised literary market and through its consecration in one of the prestigious intellectual and artistic centres of the world literary system (Paris), as well as through the mediation of translations into the dominant world languages. Attention is also given to the uniquely poetic character of this novel of memory about life in a concentration camp, which is a glocalised version of one of the world’s major literary testimonies of the Shoah.

This thematic block of articles was written at the Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies (Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts) and the Institute for Literature (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) as part of the joint research project “Image and Text as a Means of Cross-Cultural Transfer” (2020–2022). Financial support from ZRC SAZU and BAS is gratefully acknowledged. The thematic block of articles is edited by Alenka Koron and Kalina Zahova.

After a brief presentation of imagology as a field of contemporary comparative literature, the paper critically analyses the image of Bulgarians in the poem cycle Rapsodije bolgarskega goslarja (1902) by Slovenian poet Anton Aškerc (1856–1912). This cycle of thirteen poems deals with the liberation struggle of the Bulgarians from the Turks. The Bulgarian translations of the poems received a relatively extensive reception, which was not true of the original version in Slovenia. The present paper attempts to demonstrate the origin and function of the image of Bulgarians as representatives of a foreign nation or as the Other in the intercultural transfer of Aškerc’s cycle. From an imagological perspective, it sheds light on the social and cultural processes in which the poet’s image of the Foreign was formed.Keywords: image, drawing, text, manuscript, creative process