“POETICS AT THE CROSSROADS”: SERBIAN POSTMODERN LITERATURE BEFORE AND AFTER 1989 IN SLOVAKIA: THE SPECIAL CASE OF DANILO KIŠ (1935 - 1989)

Abstract

The aim of our paper is to present the general reception of the creative life and literary works of Danilo Kiš in Slovakia against the background of Serbian postmodernity. We want to do this in connection with the milestone year 1989 (the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Slovakia, but also the year of the author's death), which unfortunately did not live in a dream of democracy in Central or Southeastern Europe. Finally, it is symbolic that D. Kiš's works were relatively well-known and well received in the territory of the former Czechoslovakia, and were translated both before and after 1989, while professional general reflection on his works is increasing, especially since the 1990s, when several literary theoreticians and critics have returned to his life and creative messages with sympathy. However, we will go in medias res and present all the registered responses to the topic. The approach chosen will not be chronological, the order of these considerations will be involuntary, but in the end we will also offer a bibliographical list of all translated works from Serbian postmodern literature in the Slovak language from 1989 to 2019 in alphabetical order. It is a list of translated novels, collections of short stories, poetry selections and dramas by contemporary Serbian writers, which have been adapted by several Slovak translators. The corpus of these translated works from Serbian literature into Slovak after 1989 is therefore not only welcome, but perhaps also fully accepted.