Taalkr( )g 2018-2019

Stanka Hrastelj will be a Slovene representative at this year's Transpoesie festival in Brussels. As a part of her visit to Belgium, she will also come to Ghent University to meet students of Slovene language and other interested students. We will discuss (modern) Slovene literature and culture and get acquainted with her own poetry.

Prof. dr. Biljana Dojcinovic (University of Belgrade, Serbia)

This lecture focuses on the works and voices of silenced and sidelined talented Balkan women authors. At the centre of this lecture is the research project Књиженство, which aims at reconstructing the often forgotten and hidden landscape of Serbian women writers and their texts up to 1915. Soon, the project will extend its time span, and include the works of the poet, writer and translator Desanka Maksimović. Her translations were published in a 1969 anthology that included the poems of Blaga Dimitrova, a Bulgarian women writer. The interrelations between the translator and the poets point at a network of transnational interactions, an element that can contribute to the further study of Balkan women writers.

In 2018 Slovenia celebrates the year of Ivan Cankar (to commemorate 100th anniversary of his death). Ivan Cankar was and still is one of Slovenia's most significant writers, playwrights, poets, politicians … In 2017-2018 students of Slovene language have translated excerpts from Cankar's work. Their translations will be published in an anthology of students’ translations, together with other translations of Cankar's words in 24 different languages.

Students will introduce their work and we will watch a feature documentary to familiarize ourselves further with the life and woks of Ivan Cankar.

This event is organized as a part of a greater project called "The world festival of Slovene culture". This festival is organized in about 60 universities around the world, where students can study Slovene.

Prof. Dr. Raymond Detrez (Universiteit Gent / KU Leuven)

De lezing richt zich specifiek op een aantal overeenkomsten tussen de gărkomani (Bulgaarse stadsbewoners in de negentiende eeuw die Grieks spraken) in Plovdiv en de Franstalige Vlamingen in Brussel in de negentiende eeuw. De lezing focust op de vreemde gemengde talen die in beide steden worden gesproken en op de sociale en politieke randvoorwaarden van het verschijnen en verdwijnen van deze talen. Behalve "autobiografische" omstandigheden (Raymond Detrez is een Belg die zich met Balkanstudies bezighoudt) hebben ook wetenschappelijke overwegingen de spreker er toe gebracht om precies deze twee steden te selecteren: precies in Plovdiv leefde het grootste aantal gărkomani,  en het is uiteraard in Brussel dat er zo'n groot Franstalige Vlamingen te vinden was.

Dr. Adelina Angusheva (University of Manchester)

The lecture explores both didactic and polemic textual and visual representations of the witches in the pre-modern Balkan cultural context focusing closely on the works of Josef Bradati  (a monk from Rila Monastery), Nikodemos Agioretos (a monk from Mont Athos), and the images of the witches on the external church walls in some of the major Bulgarian monasteries (such as Rila and Troyan).

Prof. Dr. G. Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London)

The poetry of Bulgarian writer, translator and literary critic Geo Milev (1895-1925) embodies the complexities of European modernism through its aesthetic and conceptual journey from symbolism to expressionism. Milev’s poem Ad (Hell) was published three years before his untimely death at the hands of the Bulgarian police in 1925. The presentation explores the poem in the context of the European avant-garde.