Changing Pieces

In Iza’s Ballad, Magda Szabó writes about the lives of two doctors who meet and fall in love at university. “Don’t get too involved with politics,” experienced Antal warns a seemingly ingénue Iza. To which she responds: “Politics will be my life as long as I live.” In this brief encounter, Szabó connects the predominant themes of her oeuvre: politics and life, or, to be more specific, Communism and the domestic. In its analysis of Iza’s Ballad (1963), Katalin Street (1969), and The Door (1987), this article illustrates how Szabó’s descriptions of the domestic convey the impact of Hungary’s troubled political history on the concept of the home/homeland. The article illustrates the ways in which Szabó contrasts the relatively comfortable years of Goulash Communism with the hardship endured during WWII, under Rákosi, and during the 1956 Revolution, to convey the lasting effects of the Soviet occupation on the notion of home. Keywords: Magda Szabó; Hungary; homeland; 1956 Revolution; Goula...

Među fjordove i gejzire, vrletne stijene i zastrašujuće ponore, smještena je priča sestara blizanki, Halldore i Sigridur, i njihove obitelji. Priča počinje opisom pokopa Sigridur i tugom ispunjenih dana preživjele sestre. Valter Hugo Mae vrlo nam živo i slikovito pripovijeda o nestabilnoj majci, koja za smrt kćeri krivi drugu kćer te je konstantnim ranjavanjem namjerno kažnjava, nanoseći joj bol. To je i priča o odnosu oca i kćeri, koji dane provode čitajući poeziju te u njoj pronalaze sve važne odgovore, snagu i smisao života. Znakovit je to početak romana, kojim Halla opisuje trenutak sestrine smrti, ujedno označen i kao novi početak života. Nakon njezine smrti, preživjela blizanka suočava se s vlastitim unutarnjim borbama, kao i s okolinom i neprihvaćanjem obitelji. Loš odnos s majkom kompenzira nježnim trenucima s ocem, a kasnije i kroz ljubavni odnos s Einarom, prožetim dubokim osjećajima. Einar, osebujni samotnjak kojeg su se sestre kao djevojčice plašile, za sobom vuče tajnovitu...

Yasmina Saleh – Algeria At least five or six of them, maybe even more, had overrun his house and family. He was not a politician, an inciter of dissent, nor a troublesome writer; he was a decent citizen. Yet they permeated his little dreams and reluctant joys. The darkness and gloominess of the Algerian night increased after the first shot was fired; the family was overcome with unspeakable dread. Another scene of horrible confusion, terror, and carnage ensued.Mahmoud Kandeel – Egypt Despite the tombstones surrounding her, the place felt empty. The cemetery stood still but for her nervous figure, sitting and fidgeting beside a green, rusted dumpster. Agitated, the woman stuck her right hand inside her blouse and fiddled with something unseen, as though desperately searching for something lost.“Look, she’s caressing her breasts,” my companion whispered with a snicker.

In recent years, popular culture has witnessed the proliferation of violent female characters, while female criminality has also received increasing attention from many critics and academics. These women remain a fascination for both mainstream culture and researchers as their acts go against cultural conceptions and are even viewed as antithetical to femininity. And while the increasing presence of female violence in media and popular culture may be symptomatic of present-day society’s concerns about gender behavior, the portrayal of violent women still seems to be following genre conventions and familiar stereotypes that inevitably frame, and thus normalize, their acts within boundaries of traditional discourses on femininity. In that regard, Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-Feminist Era presents itself as a particularly timely book that investigates the representation of women who kill in a so-called postfeminist context recognized principally by a...

“More liquor,” said the dark-skinned man holding out his glass.“No more liquor,” said the fat man grabbing the bottle from the counter. “Indian dance now; liquor later.”“Liquor,” said the dark-skinned man stretching for the bottle.“Afterwards,” said the fat man, shielding the bottle behind his vast bulk. “Now Indian dance.” He waggled his hips and his flabby belly shook. “Now Indian dance out front. Everyone watch Indian dancing.”The dark-skinned man stopped and stared at his fat counterpart, stared at him as a famished, skittish dog might at a person chewing a sandwich in a roadside bar. The fat man waggled his hips once more, his arms upraised, the bottle in one hand and a shot glass he was drinking from in the other. The dark-skinned man chuckled.“You like that, eh?” said the fat man. His flabby jowls wobbled with laughter, his eyes vanishing between puffy little lids. “Off you go, Indian. Bwana want to see Indian dance. Me bwana, you Indian, monkey.”“Not monkey.” The Indian shook h...

The paper investigates the extent and peculiarities of censorship in two Croatian editions of Pippi Longstocking, a classic of Swedish and world children's literature. Comparing the original Swedish text, contained in three books: Pippi Langstrump (1945/1948), Pippi Langstrump gar ombord (1946/1969) and Pippi Langstrump and Söderhavet (1948/1969), with the first edition of the Croatian translation published in 1973 and its revised 1996 edition shows significant differences in the number, layout, and title of chapters, and establishes the diversity of taboo topics present in both omitted and retained chapters. The retained chapters, after joining the micro-strategies previously adapted to the collected data (according to Desmet, Davoodi), also reveal clear variability in the way of translating taboo topics, such as inappropriate behavior, life (mis)fortunes, violence, racial intolerance, and religion.Keywords: Swedish children’s literature, censorship, taboo topics, translation micro-st...