The Slovene novel in English

Among the many problems facing any attempt by a Slovene novel to reach a wider international audience through translation into English is cultural specificity. The difference between the Slovene cultural space - with its dictinctive Slavonic language, Catholicism, and Austro-German heritage - and the dominant Anglo-Saxon cultural model, may seem almost unbridgeable. However, the cultural world of the English-language novel contains plentiful precedents to suggest that even themost 'foreign' texts can thrive with it. This paper focuses on the potential difficulties involved in the translation of a work such as Drago Jančar's Katarina, pav in jezuit, finding some useful indicators in the novel The map of love, written in English by the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif.