A selection of 66 folktales collected by Cepenkov, who dedicated his life to the collection and preservation of Macedonian folk literature, translated into English for the first time by Fay Thomev. The first title in the TMacquarie University Publications in Macedonian Literature' series.
Considering children’s literature as a powerful repository for creating and proliferating cultural and national identities, this monograph is the first academic study of children’s literature in translation from the Western Balkans. Marija Todorova looks at a broad range of children’s literature, from fiction to creative non-fiction and picture books, across five different countries in the Western Balkans, with each chapter including detailed textual and visual analysis through the predominant lens of violence. These chapters raise questions around who initiates and effectuates the selection of children’s literature from the Western Balkans for translation into English, and interrogate the role of different stakeholders, such as translators, publishers and cultural institutions in the representation and construction of these countries in translated children’s literature, both in text and visually. Given the combination of this study’s interdisciplinary nature and Todorova’s detailed analysis, this book will prove to be an essential resource for professional translators, researchers and students in courses in translation studies, children’s literature or area studies, especially that of countries in the Western Balkans. .
19th Century Macedonian Folktales, translated by Fay Thomev, is the first more extensive presentation of Cepenkov's work in English. The 66 stories in this collection reflect the spirit and essence of generations of Macedonians when oral storytelling was a highly prized skill and a gift. The stories are very diverse, entertaining and instructive. They can be wise, pious, didactic, just, helpful, clever, surprising, scary, familiar, funny, hilarious and often irreverent. Marko Cepenkov (1829 -1920) dedicated his whole life to collect and preserve for posterity the enormous wealth of Macedonian folk literature. This literature embodies the deepest layers of the Macedonian collective consciousness, wisdom and philosophy of life of a sturdy area at the crossroads of cultures, civilizations, peoples and languages. Cepenkov collected more than 800 tales, 710 songs, 5,032 proverbs 100 riddles, 389 folk beliefs, 201 dreams and their interpretations, 46 sorcery incantations,67 children's games as well as pledges, curses, blessings, folk traditions, customs, examples of secret languages, descriptions of crafts and musical instruments, personal names and surnames.
This book is the first effort to present to the English speaking world the life and work of a writer who is regarded by many as the founder of modern Macedonian literature, Kiril Pejcinovik. The study involves direct engagement with primary texts and seeks to establish and define Pejcinovik's role in the transformation from the region's traditional Church Slavic literature to a modern Macedonian one. The author discusses how Pejcinovik used Turkisms in his writings in order to emphasize Orthodox Slavic separateness from Islamic Turkish culture and to emphasize the lawlessness and oppression associated with Turkish rule. By raising new questions and reexamining old ones, the study sheds new light on how the Slavic people of Macedonia became increasingly aware of their shared values, a process that is significant because this Slavic awareness has since grown into a Macedonian national identity which has asserted itself fully in the latter half of the 20th century.
In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history "Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural memory. Yet it remains a powerful marker of identity for many, with a fragmented and wide-ranging history defined by texts, myths, and memories of centuries of hardship and suffering. Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour of the various peoples who made Eastern Europe their home over the centuries, including the Roma, Jews, and Muslims; the great kingdoms of the medieval period; the rise and fall of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian empires; the dawn of the modern era; the ravages of fascism and Communism; the birth of the modern nation-state and beyond. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family’s past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity and eclecticism, and of people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating. The result is a loving and ebullient celebration of the distinctive and vibrant cultures that stubbornly persisted at the margins of Western Europe and Russia, and a powerful corrective that re-centers not only our understanding of how the modern Western world took shape but also the ways in which Eastern Europe has evolved throughout history to become what it is today.
The current volume addresses issues of micro-parametric variation in the grammar of nominal expressions in Bulgarian and Macedonian, with a special focus on features typically attributed to the Balkan Sprachbund. It is the very first attempt to approach in detail and in parallel the structure of noun phrases in the two languages, to look at how some of these features have evolved historically, to consider the order of phrase-internal modifiers, and possible reasons for deviations from default orderings, as well as the function of items, usually labelled determiners (articles, demonstratives and possessive pronouns). The noun phrase has been selected, as it offers a wealth of phenomena within phrase-internal grammar, at the same time providing insights for, and parallels to, the syntax of clauses. The selection of papers is unique, in that they build on specialised corpora specifically collected for the purposes of work on the current project. The contributors have specialised expertise in the fields of Balkan linguistics, language typology, grammatical theory, (South-)Slavic linguistics, language diachrony, and have written numerous papers published in journals and research volumes. This book reflects work on a larger project entitled "Balkan Morpho-Syntactic Similarities" with a grant from The Norwegian Research Council.