Cultural consolidation through translation: criticism of trivial literature and translations of literary criticism in the Slovene journal Ljubljanski Zvon (1900–1941)

The article deals with paraliterature in both senses of the term, as trivial literature and as a meta-literary form of literary criticism, and focuses, through a combination of bibliographical and documentary research and critical reading, on the role of translations of paraliterary texts in a literary periodical of a peripheral linguistic community in the period of cultural consolidation, i.e., in the Slovene linguistic community in the first half of the twentieth century. The results of an analysis of 504 issues of the literary journal Ljubljanski zvon between 1900 and 1941 show that while translations of literary criticism were published in the main sections of the journal, translations of trivial literature were not, but were mentioned in the journal's critical reviews. By selecting the topics dealing with other Slavonic literary traditions, translations of literary criticism were used to establish affiliation with other Slavonic nations in order to break out of the filial connections to the Habsburg polyphonous culture. Criticism of translated paraliterature served a similar cultural- and literary-consolidation purpose: Slovene translations of paraliterature published in Austria and Croatia were ignored and rejected as foreign aberrations and a threat to the linguistic purity and to the development of high-quality Slovene literature.