The stories are short and written in a special folk tradition. Children are very fond of them, as all of them focus on animals, various furry and feathered heroes (a mouse, a hedgehog, a cock, a crow, a hen, a jack hare and a jill hare). These animals love small pleasures of life and yet are the representatives of values like friendship, solidarity, generosity. The moral of each story is clear (we should not reach for the sky, for instance), however, the aesthetic quality of The Little Mill‘s language goes beyond the language of the fables.

The fine English translation was made by Rawley Grau in 2022 for Litterae Slovenicae.

About the author: 

ANJA ŠTEFAN (1969, Šempeter pri Gorici) is a Slovene poet, writer and storyteller. She graduated with degrees in Slovene and English Studies from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana and holds a Master’s degree in Folklore Studies. She works as a freelance artist. She writes poems, fairy tales, and riddles and also presents her texts in plays and literary performances. She is the pioneer of professional storytelling in Slovenia (since 1995) and the founder of the storytelling festival “Fairy Tales Today” (1998), which she ran for two decades. She is involved in researching the Slovene storytelling tradition, especially the one collected by Milko Matičetov. Anja Štefan has brought many folk tales to life through her publications in the children’s magazines Ciciban and Cicido, and through picture books and book selections. In 2019, on the 100th anniversary of Matičetov’s birthday, she published the anthology Three Hundred Hares (Tristo zajcev): the most beautiful Slovene folk tales from the estate of Milko Matičetov. In 2010, she authored the first thorough monographic presentation of another folk teller and his repertoire in the book Anton Dremelj – Resnik. Together with the best Slovene illustrators, she has published a number of original picture books and won numerous awards like Levstikova nagrada, Rastem s knjigo, Ljubljana bere, večernica etc. In 2022, Anja Štefan was also the first Slovene writer of children’s and youth literature to receive the Prešeren Fund Award (nagrada Prešernovega sklada), Slovenia’s central prize in the arts.

About the translator: 

Rawley Grau, originally from Baltimore, USA, has lived in Ljubljana since 2001. His translations from Slovene include the novels Biljard v Dobrayu (Billiards at the Hotel Dobray) and Panorama, both by Dušan Šarotar; the novel Kronosova žetev (The Harvest of Chronos) and the short-prose collection Fragma, both by Mojca Kumerdej; the novels Sušna doba (Dry Season) by Gabriela Babnik and Sukub (The Succubus) by Vlado Žabot (the latter co-translated with Nikolai Jeffs); the short fiction collection Družinske parabole (Family Parables), by Boris Pintar; and the essay collection The Hidden Handshake by Aleš Debeljak. He has also translated two plays – Ivan Cankar’s Pohujšanje v dolini šentflorjanski (Scandal in St. Florian’s Valley) and Slavko Grum’s Dogodek v mestu Gogi (An Event in the Town of Goga, co-translated with Nikolai Jeffs) – as well as poetry by Tomaž Šalamun, Miljana Cunta, Miklavž Komelj, Janez Ramoveš, Andrej Rozman Roza, and others. From Russian, he has translated a collection of poems and letters by Yevgeny Baratynsky, A Science Not for the Earth, for which he was awarded the 2016 prize for Best Scholarly Translation from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages (AATSEEL). In 2017, his translation of Dušan Šarotar’s Panorama was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.