Scipio Slataper is one of the most prominent writers from the Italian town of Trieste. Before the onslaught of World War One, Trieste was a unique urban environment and the largest port in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a financially powerful city and a cosmopolitan centre where Slavic, Germanic, and Italian cultures intersected. Much of Slataper’s oeuvre is highly influenced by Trieste’s cultural complexity and its multi-ethnic environment.
Slataper’s major literary achievement,
My Karst and My City
– a fictionalized, lyrical autobiography, translated here in its entirety – offers a unique example of an Italian modernist narrative, one that is influenced both by Slataper’s collaboration with the Florentine journal
La Voce
, and by the Germanic and Scandinavian literature that he absorbed while living in Trieste.
, together with the excerpts from his reflections on
Ibsen
and other critical essays included here, adds a new voice and a different dimension to our understanding of European modernism.