Description

8°. 283 pp. with black and white illustrations within text, [2], original hard covers with illustrated cover, blue linen spine with printed black title, original illustrated dustjacket (Very Good, very light foxing, old owner’s name on the first blank endpaper, dustjacket slightly worn).

The first modern translation of Tom Sawyer to Slovenian was made immediately after WWII (the first translation in an archaic language was published in 1921).

Tom Sawyer was one of rare children’s books in Yugoslavia, which fit the Socialist standards and where the text stayed loyal to the original and was not modified for political reasons.

The illustrations, playfully designed from simple black lines, were made by an academic painter Bogdan Grom (1918-2013), who studied art in Ljubljana, Perugia, Rome, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. In this early post-war period Grom was preparing his first exhibition in Trieste, which opened in 1949. Later he was exhibiting mostly in the United States and Yugoslavia.

The translator Milena Mohorič (1905-1972) was an author and professor. As a member of the Communist party she joined the resistance during WWII, was arrested and sent to an Italian prison camp. In 1948, after the Tito-Stalin fall-out, when Yugoslavia cut the connections with the Communist countries, Mohorič was tried for her political believes and committed to a mental hospital.

References: OCLC 1051737817. Nike K. Pokorn, Post-socialist Translation Practices: Ideological Struggle in Children’s Literature, 2012.