About the book
Simoniti’s protagonists in Teufelssprache (“The Devil’s Tongue”) are often “multi-settlers,” people from multinational environments (e.g. from Trieste or Istria), uprooted, alienated from self and surrounding – often “victims” of the violent maelstroms of history. It is for this reason that Veronica Simoniti’s fiction is a harrowing, nostalgic kaleidoscope of the war-stamped twentieth century. Her stories are not diffuse and fragmentary, but full-blooded and complex, sometimes enchantingly magical. Above all, however, they are disturbing narratives about what happens when people are transplanted from one language to another; they are about people on the border and about all those individuals who shift these borders, for example, in art (like Joseph Brodsky, Italo Calvino, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ivan Cankar, Max Brod, Carlo Michelstaedter, Silvina Ocampo or Alejandra Pizarnik). But the narrator’s central dilemma remains: If the borders of one’s language are the limits of one’s word, where are the limits of language as such? How far can we actually go?
Original title: Hudičev jezik
Edited by: Tanja Petrič
Afterword: Tanja Petrič
Afterward translation: Metka Wakounig
ISBN: 978-961-6995-34-4
Pages: 222
Price: 18,00 EUR
About the translator
From the press
“The contact point of these exceptional protagonists definitely lies in their supranational, hybrid identity. They are at home everywhere and nowhere, nimbly passing through various worlds, constantly crossing visible and invisible borders, speaking and thinking in many languages, and, as they search for identity, they newly define such concepts as mother tongue, home and native land and foreignness.”
Mojca Kirbiš, Literatura
“The Devil’s Tongue is an impressive braiding of the concrete and the abstract; its intelligent prose encompasses complex questions of language and identity, but does so through sensual, visually strong, even meaty images. We are often somewhere at sea, in the sun, in the midst of lush vegetation, in fantasy places with magical-fantastical elements, miles away from the grey, everyday life of small Ljubljana apartments, bureaucratic offices or muddy countryside which form, in a realistic manner, the literary landscape of Slovenian prose. The structure of heroes, mixed-heritage and exiled individuals in national, spiritual, linguistic, perspectival and behavioural terms dictates the fundamental issues of the collection.”
Iva Kosmos, Dnevnik
“Translator Veronika Simoniti’s second collection is an orchestrally harmonious set of short, stylistically rich, and playful and atmospherically lyrical stories.”
Mojca Pišek, Dnevnik
“Veronika Simoniti is a true intellectual who navigates linguistic hoops and plays with symbols; nevertheless, it would be a pity not to recognize that her writing also sees, hears, smells, touches and taste very good indeed. Speaking through her lines are extremely sharp and finely harmonious senses, a great narrative gift, which rapturously casts spells. [...] The fullness of her writing is inspired by a Mediterranean joyfulness, albeit one that does not identify uncritically with it – even here one can feel an utmost creative division. That is why she created a completely new feeling: spontaneity, as seen by a fragile and reticent person, a combination of tenderness and passion, of the sensual and the intellectual, of the picturesque and the ironic. Above all, she has once again brought into modern sensibility a sense of everything that is great, transcendent, remote and unachievable. Her work is fascinatingly permeated with the beauty of the earthly.”
Lucija Stepančič, Sodobnost
