"I must confess that as a translator, one of the greatest joys of the profession is to translate a beloved book suggested by oneself. That is what happened to me with Il mio Carso by Scipio Slataper, which I have just finished translating and am currently finalising for publication.
Scipio Slataper lived a remarkably short life: he was born in Trieste in 1888, under Austro-Hungarian domination, and died in 1915 during the First World War. He fought as a volunteer alongside the Italian army. He wrote Il mio Carso shortly before the war, in 1912. The book is a love song to Planet Earth, to the mountains and the sea, but also a lot more. It recounts several episodes of the author's life. Sometimes beautiful and sometimes painful, these moments always celebrate emotions I would dare to describe as extreme. Inspired by a swim in the sea with friends or a run through the fragrant Karst vegetation, his physical experiences always seem to trigger spiritual epiphanies. The lyric intensity of the descriptions and the freedom he allows himself in introducing words from the Trieste dialect, which he feels closer to, produce a text of great beauty, but not at all easy to translate. That is precisely the reason why the search for the proper form is such a great pleasure.
The book will be published in Catalan in April 2025 by the publishing house Minúscula from Barcelona, which has a long-standing tradition of publishing Triestine authors. Readers of this book aren’t those craving a gripping plot, but I do hope it will captivate those who appreciate the beauty of a book in its language and poetic imagery".