Dialogi
Eurozine
Dialogi
2008-01-02
Summary for Dialogi 10/2007
Editor for critical thinking Boris Vezjak continues to investigate political pressures on the Slovenian media and the difficulties of Slovenian journalists. When the Slovenian Prime Minister ignored the appeal of the International Press Institute and Reporters Without Borders and then when the appeal was also largely ignored by the Slovenian media, he provides a number of reasons for this. Vezjak comments on the situation in the introductory editorial of the issue, and continues the topic in Social Diagnosis, in which he asks questions about the psychological and social blackmail of journalists in an interview with Neva Nahtigal, vice president of the Slovenian Journalists Union.
Our guest in Conversation is curator Jurij Krpan. In Dialogi 5-6 we published the responses of numerous experts, creators, and connoisseurs of the visual arts to his set-up of the last Triennial of Contemporary Slovenian Art. Guest editor Beti Zerovc invited Krpan to explain his approach and principles of operation.
Next come two articles on Chinese literature. Tina Ilgo writes on the influence of Chinese literary tradition and Western fiction on the development of modern Chinese literature, which began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. During this time there was a break with traditional literary values, which exalted primarily the essay and classical poetry, and a flourishing of translation of western fiction. Maja Lavrach writes about one of the most famous love stories in Chinese history and the poem based on it, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, written by Bai Juyi (772-846).
In Reading we publish a selection of poems by the Serbian-Bosnian poet Zdravko Kecman, who writes poetry in the so-called dark modernist style. The poems were translated by Jurij Hudolin, who also contributes a foreword about the author. Next, two of the best known Slovenian prose writers each publish a short story on the theme of love: Vinko Möderndorfer, in Roman and Julija, tells the love story of two inexperienced young people in a socially deprived environment, and Suzana Tratnik, in Good Jeans, writes about existential loss and lesbian love. We also publish poems by David Bedrach and Jan Smarchan.
In Cultural diagnosis we publish two reviews of two books: the Slovene translation of the book by American dancer and choreographer Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, and a collection by Vesna Radanovich When did you die? Haps and mishaps of Slovenian chidren's fiction writers. A special text is devoted to the category of queer documentaries at the recent DokMa festival of documentary films in Maribor.
Igor Zunkovich, a Dialogi associate, student of philosophy and comparative literature, and participant in a student exchange in Berlin, contributes this issue's Diary.
In Detector, film editor Robert Petrovich puts some questions to the program coordinator of the DokMa festival, Saska Goropevsek. Given the increased interest in documentary film in the world as well as its increased production, their main topic of discussion was the concept of the Maribor festival, and the response to it by the public and cultural policy.