Slovak Literature in English Translation

That Alluring Land is comprised of five stories and one novella, selected and translated by Norma Rudinsky, originally written between 1896 and 1918, Timrava’s most productive period: “The Assistant Teacher” (1896), “That Alluring Land” (1907), “Battle” (1900), “The Ťapák Clan” (1914), and “The Great War Heroes” (1918). It is the first, and so far the only, book-length English translation of her work. Reviewing the collection for the Slavic and East East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 1994, Gordana P. Crnkovic says: “Timrava’s stories, written in a deceptively simple style, depict a village society which has very little pastoral about it. It is sharply divided according to economic and class differences, and it has some characteristics of a totalitarian system: everyone surveys and is surveyed by everyone else, the network of gossip transmits information about every person’s actions, and each villager is both executioner and victim of a fixed grid of social conventions.”