The Polish Book Institute

In Macedonia, a translation of Ostatnia miłość (‘Last Love’) was published. The book was translated by Ilija Trajkowski. The publication of the novel by Eliza Orzeszokwa was supported by the Book Institute as part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme.

Najposlje ljubow, which is the title of the Macedonian edition of the novel Last Love, has been recently published by the Martina-Komerc publishing house in Skopje. 

Last Love is the first novel in Orzeszkowa's oeuvre. Before 1880, her work was dominated by the poetics of predilection, which the writer considered at that time to be a condition for truly valuable work. It is not art for art’s sake and not ‘perverse fantasies’, fairy-tale characters and bizarre plots that are supposed to revive modern literature, but the rational recreation of "entirely earthly things", usefulness, and current noble purposes. Last Love is exactly one of those novels that contain those theses where mentoring narrative omniscience goes hand in hand with unambiguous judgments of the world depicted in the novel, and the characters, their utterances, and events are the illustrations of the assumed aspirations.

Although this principle of creativity led to a schematic approach to characters, the simplification of storylines and naively ‘meaningful’ endings, those engaged novels and novellas conveyed an immense amount of realistic knowledge about the society of that time.

As part of the ©POLAND Translation Programme, Ilija Trajkowski, the translator of the book, has also introduced Macedonian readers to Stefan Żeromski’s Ludzie bezdomni [‘Homeless People’ (2017)] and Szczepan Twardoch’s Morfina [‘Morphine’ (2016)].