Danica Cerce

Where Is 'East of Eden’? The Politics of Steinbeck’s Literary Reputation in Slovenia

Katherine Arens maintains that literary texts or authors can function as prototypes for their speech genres within literary history and in a cultural community. Until very recently, in Slovenia, John Steinbeck has been regarded primarily as an objective social chronicler of the Great Depression. This popular critical view, earned with his “labor trilogy,” The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, and Of Mice and Men, is needlessly limiting, given that Steinbeck’s literary achivements extend well beyond the modes and methods of traditional realism or documentary representation. Written against the background of the critical discourse regarding the political implications of literary works and the ways in which readers are involved in creating the texts they read, this essay analyzes the indicators of and the plausible reasons for the unprecedented popularity of Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden. It shows that in past decades, when Slovenia was in the grip of communist rule, even this book, concerned with moral dilemmas and personal traumas, rather than dealing with the workers’ struggle for social change, could not escape a political reading and served to promote an ideology it does not formally articulate.

Between translation and transformation: recreating Steinbeck’s language in Of Mice and Men

ABSTRACT In Steinbeck’s novels set in the Great Depression and dealing with the agricultural labour scene, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), dialect and slang alternate with passages composed in Standard English. While this combination of languages represents a unique challenge to a skilful translator, it seems to have had the least satisfactory reconstruction in most Slovene editions of Steinbeck’s works. The dilemma of how to preserve the coarseness of diction of Steinbeck’s impulsive and almost illiterate protagonists without affecting the poetics and emotional richness of the narrative is particularly relevant in translating the novel Of Mice and Men (1937). The book consists mainly of dialogue that reveals the writer’s intimate knowledge of the language spoken by the protagonists, uneducated migrant ranch workers. Taking up Gideon Toury’s proposal to analyse a translation in terms of its adequacy in relation to the source text and its acceptability to the target audience, this article aims to establish whether the Slovene translators of these novels achieved a balance between domestication and foreignisation translation strategies. In particular, it aims to illustrate how they understood and transposed various stylistic markers (colloquial diction, repetitions) from the source to the target texts. The first part will provide a brief overview of Slovene translations; the second part will focus on the recent translation of Of Mice and Men.