Urška
Book not yet available in English
Summary:
What happens when the Prešeren Fund laureate Andrej Rozman Roza meets Prešeren himself at a wild hootenanny? Meet Urška the bored heroine of our time and her homme fatal, a mysterious and fatally attractive charmer. “It really sucks if you’re too hot / for every body of this lot” is the couplet opening this amusing contemporary rewriting of Prešeren’s epic poem Povodni Mož [The Water Man], a poem every Slovenian schoolchild will know. Its retelling centred around the present-day snob has now become almost as famous as the original and as soon as it was rendered into a picture book, it flew off the shelves. It recounts the tale of the author Andrej Rozman Roza attending a hootenanny in Ljubljana’s old town. Once there, he meets France Prešeren and a bored yet gorgeous girl waiting for “a guy handsome enough to go dancing with” catches the eyes of both of them. How does it end? Just like Prešeren’s Urška, Rozman Roza’s also disappears mysteriously into a river with her dance partner. (source: publisher)
Edited by: Mestna knjižnica Ljubljana
Comment:
As is evident from the title, this is a retelling of Prešeren’s ballad about Urška the vain damsel from Ljubljana. The author gives a full-blown report of teenage Urška’s encounter with an unnamed biker which tragically ends in the river flowing under the Sava bridge. With humorous and juicy language as well as with slang, the author transforms the tragic atmosphere into comical and thus transcends the stereotypes about typical female and male character traits. The illustrator is providing a “camera” to report the rising action. He captures every fleeting detail on tape, be it a huffing face or a risen skirt or even a drab shadow of a tree, against which both authors, rejected – Prešeren and Rozman – are slouching. The picture book has been awarded the Kristina Brenkova Award for the original Slovenian picture book and it has received the Golden Pear Mark of Quality.