WRITING ON THE BORDER: TRIESTE AS A SMALL AREA OF GREAT DIFFERENCES

Text topic: Globalization and Literature

Text author: Владислава Гордић Петковић

Multilingualism has been an important element in the history of Trieste, a prosperous seaport with a lively cultural scene, situated at the crossroads of Germanic, Latin and Slavic cultures. The mash of various influences on this small area of great cultural differences is pictured in the novels by probably the best Istrian author Fulvio Tomizza (an Italian who was born near Umago and moved thirty kilometers up north to spend the greatest part of his life in Trieste), and his younger contemporary Marko Sosič, a writer and theatre director, who is one of the most notable representatives of the Slovene community in Italy. They both write their novels against the backdrop of ethnic and linguistic otherness, extensively exploring both the multilingual situation of their environment and the individual histories of characters displaced and uprooted for various reasons. Sosič uses different linguistic varieties in his novel Ballerina,ballerina, with the intention of depicting a specific multilingual situation of the Slovene community in Italy.