DOI: 10.4312/elope.11.1.5-10 

From Knowledge to Wisdom: he Arc of a Scholarly Life 

Coincidence has it that this year’s Spring issue of ELOPE will be published one year almost to the day since Professor Darja Hribar, a long-term member of the Slovenian branch of ESSE, passed away. Even though a sad anniversary in itself, this nevertheless is also an occasion that brings back many fond memories. Professor Hribar was one of the most popular and esteemed professors among generations of English and translation students at the University of Maribor; for those of us who worked with her, she was a competent scholar with human qualities that can only be wished for in a colleague; to those of us who knew her more intimately, Darja was a warm, gentle friend with that unique, indelible smile on her face, someone who was always prepared to help and with whom one could always engage in an intriguing conversation. She was graciously welcoming to newcomers when the department absorbed three new professors from abroad. hat her name is regularly mentioned in conversation among us is just one indication of the lasting legacy of her personality. 
Despite her noble personal and professional traits, life did not always treat her well. She lost a father to whom she was closely attached at a very young age; as a result, she had to ind her own way in life and support herself from early on. After completing grammar school in Ptuj, she studied English and Italian at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, from which she graduated in 1975. After graduation, she irst gained experience as an in-house translator for a company in Ljubljana, then worked as a librarian and translator at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Law, and served as a secretary for the International Sociological Association. In between, she was a freelance literary translator and an oicial court interpreter. For her own enjoyment, she occasionally worked as a tour-guide and spent time abroad, the longest stay being two years in London, which partly explains her cosmopolitan character. In between, her ainity for Romance languages and cultures led her to study Spanish part-time at the University of Zagreb (1978-82). Because of the same ainity, she was later invited to co-author the Slovene encyclopedic lexicon of world literature Svetovna književnost (World Literature; Hribar and Dolinar 1984), to which she contributed over 50 entries about Spanish literature. 
In 1989 she became professor of English and American literature at the Faculty of Arts in Maribor, where she continued to work even past her oicial retirement in 2008. Her career at the University of Maribor unfortunately was often overshadowed by her health problems. She was irst diagnosed with cancer in the mid-1990s. She successfully fought the illness and recovered from it, only to have it return a second time several years later. However, she beat it once again. She probably would not have been able to do so without her incredibly strong desire to live, combined with a healthy lifestyle and support from her partner Niko. hose who knew her better will also remember the importance of Bučko, the cat that was Darja’s and Niko’s companion and source of joy for 19 years. However, to everyone’s concern, the cancer returned for a third time in 2012; this time Darja’s body was already too weak to ight back and she succumbed in May 2013. 
Although health concerns dogged her for most of her academic career, Darja’s output was still considerable. As the only in-house professor of English and American literature at the University of Maribor in the early 1990s, in what was still a very young Department of Germanic Languages, she faced a demanding task: not only did she have to develop from scratch most of the literature courses in English, but she also had to teach them. Her teaching thus ranged from medieval to 20th-century literature. However, she was up to the task. Even though her teaching was versatile, throughout her career her main focus was drama, in particular the theatre of the absurd. 
Her research into absurdist drama and its inluence on contemporary Slovene playwrights was among the earliest in Slovenia. In her Master’s thesis (1993), she analyzed the impact of absurdist philosophy and aesthetics on Peter Božič and Drago Jančar; she then revised and broadened her indings in a more recent article (2004), where she provided a macrostructural as well as stylistic analysis of Jančar’s Stakeout at Godot’s (Zalezujoč Godota (1988)). Her indings highlight a strong link between Jančar and Samuel Beckett in terms of structural and linguistic features; the former follows the latter in dramatic composition, monotonous plot development as well as the choice to merge emphatically philosophical modes of expression with the decidedly banal, a choice which we also ind in Stoppard and Pinter. 
She pursued the same topic in her Doctoral thesis (1999b) focusing on the dramatic opus of Harold Pinter, one of the greatest contemporary British playwrights, particularly his speciic “Pinteresque” style, which – interestingly – entered the dictionary while he was still alive (Hribar and Onič 2011). It comes as no surprise that she became the Slovenian authority on this Nobel Prize winning playwright, particularly on the translation of his stylistic features (2004). 
Her extensive, detailed knowledge of the conventions of modern drama allowed her research to broaden into the ield of drama translation (e.g., 2005a). Not only was she a proliic literary translator with over 40 translations of prose, drama and radio plays from various languages, but she also dealt with approaches to the theory of literary translation (e.g., 1999a, 2002a). It is thanks to Darja Hribar that many of the most recent international theoretical approaches to drama translation (e.g., van Leuven-Zwart, Bassnet, Pavis, van den Broeck, Merino, and Lefevere, to name just a few) were introduced almost simultaneously into Slovene scholarship. Among other things, she drew attention to the phenomenon of adaptation, an integral part of practically every translation for the stage. She irmly believed – and also proved in both her research as well as translation practice (see, e.g., 2005b) – that the contemporary theoretical perception of drama translation cannot function properly without the translator’s elaborate insight into all poetic elements as well as various other semiotic systems involved in the encoding and decoding of theatrical pieces. 
Darja Hribar also dealt with non-verbal semantic theories and their application in theatre translation (2001, 2002b, 2007a). She constantly stressed the value of the translator’s awareness of non-verbal phenomena in theatrical texts, since these possess a considerable meaning potential that is often overlooked in translation practice. Relying mainly on the theoretical foundations of Fernando Poyatos (1997) and Reba Gostand (1980), she claimed that non-verbal elements should receive as much attention by the translator as the verbal ones. he same applies to stylistic features, which in importance almost equal and overlap with the lexical ones. Professor Hribar was particularly interested in register, i.e., the varieties of language used in diferent language settings. She examined the levels of source and target languages in several articles and conference papers (2006, 2007b). She proved that even though lexical choices in translation allow considerable freedom, they are subject to a number of intratextual and extratextual factors deining the genre, the kind of translation, and speciic features of individual plays. 
Professor Hribar successfully implemented her practical and theoretical insights into her academic career. Starting in the early 1990s, she published over 30 papers in international publications or presented them at international conferences. She taught courses in drama, literary translation, stylistics and audiovisual translation and played a key role in the development of Translation Studies in Maribor at the turn of the century. As a dedicated teacher, whose main priority throughout her academic career remained students, Darja supervised independently or in collaboration several dozen diploma papers in literature and translation. She also supervised one PhD thesis. In addition, she co-authored all the recent undergraduate and graduate study programs in English and translation at the University of Maribor. Besides being a founding member of SDAŠ, she was part of the editorial board of ELOPE. 

Because of Professor Darja Hribar’s contribution to English Studies in Slovenia, ELOPE has decided to dedicate this volume to her memory. he papers in it are a selection of papers that were submitted to the journal in response to a special call that was issued in 2013. 
To open the linguistic section, Katja Plemenitaš’s paper deals with the contrastive approach to the concept of linguistic sexism in the English and Slovene cultural contexts. It analyses two manuals for non-sexist use of English and discusses the reasons for diferences between the two languages regarding the linguistic expression of gender, as well as the cultural and historical context in which both languages have developed. he paper proceeds to the examination of various linguistic and social concepts that inluence the debate on linguistic sexism. 
Frančiška Lipovšek focuses on two signiicant aspects in which the prepositions from and to difer from other prepositions of movement. he reason for this diference is the existence of two place-functions in their conceptual structure: the irst one is the same as that found in the conceptual structure of at, and the second one is not speciied but can be lexicalized separately. he structure with two place-functions allows for a second preposition, but can at the same time account for the unacceptability of from at and to at. he paper proceeds to examine the reasons for this diference and problematizes the traditional deinitions of from and to. 
Rounding up the language section, Klementina Jurančič Petek’s paper addresses the issue of L1 dialect interference in the pronunciation of English as a foreign language. he author’s own research completed in 2007 complements a previous study from 1991 by Wieden and Nemser, in which the researchers investigate the development of pronunciation of English as a foreign language in Austria. Jurančič Petek employs a contrastive analysis of Slovene Standard pronunciation and English as well as that of the sound systems of individual Slovene dialects and English. 
In the literature section, Michelle Gadpaille analyzes an early German detective novel from the nineteenth century via its English translation. he story is set in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the territory of today’s Slovenia. Apart from seeing the novel as an example of the developing genres of crime and detective iction, Gadpaille also explores the ethnic tensions on the frontiers of the Empire, which is relected in the novel’s depiction of intra-ethnic tension in the Slovenian village where the crime occurs. his study aims to rehabilitate an almost forgotten work of literature with a Slovene component. 
Nursen Gömceli’s paper focuses on Timberlake Wertenbaker’s recent play Credible Witness and considers the ways in which the playwright shapes her multi-national characters to address the concepts of history, nationality and identity in modern society. he play is set in a London detention centre where the asylum-seeking immigrants from various Asian, African and European countries efectively open the issues of how human personality changes under the inluence of losing or changing one’s identity and what emotional consequences this entails. 
he literature section concludes with a paper from the ield of poetry. In his research, Victor Kennedy examines a selection of songs from Martin Simpson’s 1976 debut album, Golden Vanity, and observes them through the lens of the traditional ballad genre. Apart from analyzing typical ballad characteristics like “leaping” and “lingering”, Kennedy traces the historical origins of individual ballads and argues that, despite their early origin, they are still relevant for the contemporary listener. 
Also in the domain of literature, but from a perspective of language teaching, Janez Skela’s article addresses the question of using literary texts in the pedagogical process of learning English as a foreign language. he paper presents the results of research into the inclusion of literary texts or excerpts in EFL course books and attempts to explain the decline of literature in English language teaching. 
Melita Kukovec starts her paper by addressing and evaluating the issue of cross-curricular and interdisciplinary teaching, which allows the teacher to activate more of the learners’ senses and intelligences. he paper later focuses on a concrete literary text that can be used to join English and Mathematics, two school subjects from the opposite poles of preference of an average learner, i.e., Mark Haddon’s he Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. he inal part of the paper demonstrates how the usage of this or a similar text in class can help learners to achieve the whole range of Bloom’s levels of educational objectives. 
Bringing together the ields of teaching and translation, Primož Jurko’s article discusses the relatively modest inclusion of language corpora in the pedagogical process. After suggesting some possible reasons for this situation, the author presents the results of a survey conducted among Slovene university students of translation, which focused on the usage of a target language corpus in the course of Slovene-to-English translation in terms of English collocation. he results show that fewer collocation errors in translation are made if the translator uses an L2 corpus, which yields a translation with a higher level of idiomaticity. 
In another contrastive translation study, Simon Zupan and Marko Štefanič analyze translation shifts between the original and the translation of the non-iction novel Hostile Waters. Special attention is dedicated to technical jargon, which represents a salient feature of the novel’s language. What is more, the authors report that most translation shifts arise from incorrect interpretation of jargon in the original, which results in a modiied perception of the target-text readership. 
To conclude the volume, Tina Cupar and Alenka Valh Lopert’s article deals with the process of characterization as achieved through linguistic means in an animated fairy tale. heir research into the speech of a cartoon character is based on a speech transcript and includes an analysis of the English original as well as the Slovene translation. Special care is given to the use of dialect in the target language. he analysis proceeds to a multi-layered contrastive comparison of the language varieties used, which serves for the qualitative evaluation of the impact of these shifts on the macrostructure of the text. 
We believe that the articles in this issue are an appropriate homage to Darja for various reasons: their authors comprise not only her colleagues from the University of Ljubljana and the University of Maribor but also some who were her students; the issue also has an international, even a cosmopolitan character, similar to Darja’s; last but not least, thematically, the papers cover all the areas that were of interest to her throughout her career: from literature and translation to teaching and stylistics. 
Simon Zupan and Tomaž Onič 
Editors of Volume XI – Spring 

References 
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