Neighboring countries: Slavic literature gains a foothold in Buenos Aires with studios and publishing houses

Jana Putrle Srdić was among the guests at the Poetry Festival held at the last Buenos Aires Book Fair. The Slovenian writer also presented her novel "Por toda la llanura bajo el cielo" (Across the Plain Under the Sky) , her second book published in Argentina, in the city and in Córdoba. The trip and the program reflected a little-noticed event : a wave of dissemination. of Slavic literature in Spanish, which has its center in Buenos Aires and is manifested in a movement of academic studies, cultural events and editorial productions about to celebrate twenty years of sustained activity.

Slavic culture has multiple sources of exposure in Buenos Aires . “There are several publishing houses that publish Slavic literature, there's an important research group at the University of Buenos Aires, we founded the Argentine Dostoevsky Society, which organizes a biannual conference, and we have the journal Eslavia (eslavia.com.ar), a pioneer in research on Slavic literature in Spanish,” says Julia Sarachu , translator and professor of Slavic Literature , “one of the most popular in Puán.”

The poet, writer and editor Aleš Šteger (1973) first visited Argentina in the midst of the 2001 crisis, and since then , Slovenian writers have travelled there continuously . In 2006, the Gog i Magog publishing house began a series of publications of contemporary and 19th-century literature, including the novel Gothic Scenes by Ivan Cankar (1876–1918), one of the first Slovenian works to achieve international recognition.

Julia Sarachu highlights the influence of political history on Slovenian literature, due to the country's integration into the Austrian Empire from the 10th century and its incorporation into Yugoslavia after the First and Second World Wars: "Within the socialist state, literature promoted creative and expressive freedom in a context of censorship and aesthetic prescriptions," she explains.

"At the same time, there was a poetic line related to the theme of love , although the current of political literature was hegemonic," says the writer and teacher in secondary schools in the province of Buenos Aires. After independence was declared on June 25, 1991, " the theme of meaninglessness, the banality of existence, emerged strongly , for example in the work of Brane Mozetič (1958), a poet translated and published by Gog & Magog, and on the other hand, a literature appeared more focused on the description of the external world, with a strong influence from Anglo-Saxon literature."

Far from common sense, the cultures of Eastern Europe "are, however, a source of curiosity and exchanges with our world that are much closer and more dynamic than one might suppose," say the editors of Eslavia. The articles, reviews, interviews, and chronicles published in the magazine attest to these interests and influences.

“ The Slavic peoples have gone through a process that has points in common with our history ,” Julia Sarachu points out. “They were influenced by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution from a peripheral position, they integrated into modernity in a problematic and late manner, and they experienced the conflict between civilization and barbarism with elites educated in foreign values. Another common problem is ethnic diversity, which in America is related to immigration and coexistence with indigenous peoples, and in the Slavic region to the proximity of Asia and the Turkish and Mongol invasions .”

Throughout the Plain Under the Sky, Jana Putrle Srdić's novel, " is like a mirror of our culture viewed with suspicion from a foreigner's perspective," notes Sarachu, who translated it. The writer first visited Argentina in 2011, when she published her collection of poems Anything Can Happen , participated in the Rosario Poetry Festival, and visited Tierra del Fuego.

The fiction revisits the experiences of that journey through Hana, the author's alter ego, although it focuses on the conflict between the alienated life in big cities and a return to nature as a possible way out.

Born in Ljubljana in 1975, Jana Putrle Srdić is also an art critic and translator, and her poetry and fiction books have been translated into English, German, and Romanian . All Over the Plain Under the Sky poses a tension between childhood memories associated with direct experiences of the natural world, and a present in which emerges “a familiar sense of belonging to wild creatures,” activated by the landscape of the Argentine plain, and on the other hand between the attraction of solitude, linked to mourning the death of a partner, and the search for connections.

The dilemma is resolved when Hana meets Victoria, a young woman from Buenos Aires with whom she shares a trip to Tierra del Fuego and, ultimately, to Chilean Patagonia.

Between "the wild world and the world of books," the protagonist of Por toda la llanura bajo el cielo frequents a bookstore in Palermo, meets people at a queer disco, and dreams of Borges. Distant cultures are brought closer together through the observation of small details: the silence of the National Library cannot be compared to that of the National University Library in Ljubljana; Argentina appears as "a land of strong women, where life for them is not easy"; one street in Ushuaia resembles another in Kranjska Gora, a ski resort at the foot of the Alps in northwestern Slovenia.

Slovenian literature in Argentina has notable poetry publications such as Woman in the Woods by Svetlana Makarovič (1939), New Windows by Primoz Cuznik (1971), and The End Will Begin in the Suburbs by Peter Semolic (1967). Makarovič is particularly part of “a reaction against a conservative policy that had been advancing relentlessly since Slovenia’s independence,” says Sarachu, and with the “I Will Wear the Red Star” festival, organized by the poet, “the epic and partisan culture that had been glorified during the socialist regime were vindicated.”

A prominent writer and editor who considers himself more European than a national author, Aleš Šteger participated in poetry festivals in Buenos Aires and Rosario, gave presentations at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, and published in Argentina the collection of poems Testimonio (translated by Florencia Ferré, Ciudad Gótica, 2021) and Cuentos de la guerra (translated by Sarachu, Gog & Magog, 2023).

This book marks the reappearance of the political theme in Slovenian literature , along with other themes such as “the discrimination suffered by immigrants from other countries of the former Yugoslavia who migrate to Slovenia in search of better working conditions, for example in the work of Goran Vojnović or the fight against discrimination towards LGBTIQ+ groups that had already been initiated and is continued by Brane Mozetič ,” says the translator.

A descendant of Slovenians, Sarachu was imbued with a certain legacy of Slavic culture from a young age : "In my grandfather's stories, it appeared to me as an epic of great tragic and romantic beauty." She is now one of the leading translators of that literature.

"The circulation of Slovenian writers, coupled with the publication and dissemination of their works in the cultural world of Buenos Aires," he states, "has fostered the growth of Slavic studies and changed the perception of contemporary literature ." On the map of poetry and fiction, Argentina and Slovenia are neighboring countries.