РАДМИЛА ШАЛАБАЛИЋ И ПЕТРОНИЈЕ
RADMILA ŠALABALIĆ AND PETRONIUS

Summary/Abstract: When in 1976 the new Serbian translation of Petronius’ Satyricon by Radmila Šalabalić (1927-2011) came to light, it marked a turning point in the practices of our translators of classical authors. By taking an entirely new stylistic direction, basically oriented to the works and authors of the satirical and realistic genres of classical literature, Prof. Šalabalić made a decisive impact on the younger generation of translators. The distinctive feature of this new poetics is primarily associated with the entirely original and innovative use of the Serbian language and its different literary and colloquial variants and local idioms as the most powerful stylistic device for conveying parodistic and humorous potential of the original text. Regarding the narrative of the Latin prototype as historically conditioned, deeply idiosyncratic and thus ‘alienated’ from the contemporary reader, i.e. incomprehensible in many ways (different civilization, different habits, different national and historical mentalities etc.), Radmila Šalabalić succeeds in applying the Serbian linguistic element of the translation as an effective means of text ‘de-alienation’, thus bringing the reader closer to the realistic, satirical and parodistic aspects of the meaning inherent in the original.

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