Teufelssprache

Simoniti's protagonists in &quote;Teufelssprache&quote; (&quote;The Devil's Tongue&quote;) are often &quote;multi-settlers,&quote; people from multinational environments (e.g. from Trieste or Istria), uprooted, alienated from self and surrounding - often &quote;victims&quote; 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: &quote;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?&quote;

Veronika Simoniti (1967) is a graduate of Italian and French Studies. For several years she worked as a freelance translator. She started writing as a storyteller for Radio Slovenia. For her first published story, "Metuljev zaliv" (Butterfly Bay; 2000), she received first prize in a Literatura magazine competition. She has also published in other literary journals and for the radio, receiving many awards. Her debut collection of short stories "Zasukane Storije" (Twisted Stories; 2005) was nominated as the debut of the year in 2006, and it won "Dnevnik" newspaper's 2007 Fabula Award. In 2011 she published "Hudicev jezik" (The Devil's Tongue; LUD Literatura), which was her second collection of short stories, and in 2014 she published the novel "Kameno seme" (Stoney Seed; Zalozba Litera), nominated for the "Kresnik Award" for the best Slovenian novel. Two of her stories have appeared within "Delo" newspaper's "Summer Stories" collection (2006 and 2012). Her work is included in the English-language anthology of Slovenian short stories "A Lazy Sunday Afternoon" (Litteræ Slovenicæ, DSP, 2007), as well as in the anthology of Slovenian authors "Klici me po imenu" (Call Me by Name; studentska zalozba, 2013). Excerpts for her work have appeared in translation catalogues, magazines and in internet publications in Croatian, Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Italian and Serbian.