Marko Sosič

Ballerina, Ballerina

Translation

Maja Visenjak Limon

About the book

The narrator of this novel is Ballerina, a fifteen-year-old with the cognitive faculties of a child, and each of its fifteen chapters begins with her first wetting her bed and thereby greeting a new day. Drawing comparison to William Faulkner in its expressionistic depiction of Ballerina’s interior world, this is a classic of contemporary Slovenian literature: a hugely popular exploration of a character whose world is so divorced from what we think of as reality.

Original title: Balerina, balerina

Edition: Dalkey Archive Press

ISBN: 978-1-62897-097-5

Pages: 99

Price: 12,00 EUR

(2014)

About the author

Marko Sosič

Marko Sosič was born in Trieste in 1958. He has directed at various Slovenian and Italian theaters, as well as for television and radio. He started publishing fiction in the late ’80s, and is the author of several books, including a collection of short stories and an autobiographical novel about his time in the theater. Ballerina, Ballerina, his first novel, received the Vstajenje Award, and also earned him the first Citta’ di Salò Prize in 2005. In 2007, the Slovenian Pen Club nominated the novel for the international Strega Europeo Award, and it has been selected for inclusion in the “100 Slavic Novels” project.

About the translator

Maja Visenjak Limon

Maja Visenjak Limon is a translator. She studied Comparative Literature and English Language and Literature at the University of Ljubljana. Following her graduation, she moved to the UK with her British husband. Having completed a course in software programming she worked in a number of computer support and training posts in London. Maja began translating in 1997 and in 1998 moved back to Slovenia, where she has since worked as a freelance translator into English. Most of her published translations are of Miha Mazzini novels such as Operacija Cartier (The Cartier Project), Telesni čuvaj (Guarding Hanna), Kralj ropotajočih duhov (The King of the Rattling Spirits) and his short stories. Her other published literary translations include Maja Novak’s Mačja kuga (The Feline Plague), Janez Trdina’s Bajke in povesti o Gorjancih (Tales from the Gorjanci Hills), Slavko Pregelj’s Geniji v kratkih hlačah (Geniuses Without Pants), and Marko Sosič’s Balerina, balerina (Ballerina, Ballerina). Maja lives in Ljubljana with her husband David and daughter Anja.

Ballerina, Ballerina is a painful and poetic reconstruction of its narrator's fractured worldview . . . in both the details of her family life and the bits of the mass-media reality that flow beyond the boundaries of her backyard . . . [she] is unreliable, disoriented, atemporal.
Vladislava Gordić Petković

Marko Sosič

Ballerina, Ballerina

Choose from available titles

About the book

About the author

About the translator

From the press