Pain and death in minimalist literary works for children in Slovak translation

In the paper we focus on currently problematic topic in the literature for children, i.e. pain and death. We are confirmed that preparation for death is important even in early age, because a child might better understand the life purpose while he/she is investigating what the death is. Education of children towards the understanding of pain and death as the essential part of their lives is a fundamental pedagogic issue. Period of childhood is not the reason for any reduction of the knowledge, because subjective or objective touch of death will not exclude the child, who is only entering the life. We deal in this paper with motif of pain and loss via two literary works for children available in Slovak translation, which have so called minimalist character. These are the text by German author and illustrator Wolf Erlbruch (Duck, Death and Tulip) and literary text by Norwegian writer Jostein Gaarder (Anton and Jonatan). In understanding of minimalism in our contribution we follow Zuzana Stanislavová (2013), who considers it to be a specific style of writing, which achieves maximum effect via usage of minimal expressive means. Both analysed artistic texts are characterised by simple vocabulary, poor usage of adjectives, use of factual appellatives, low figurativeness of language, reduced frequency of hyperbole and metaphor, simple sentence structure with shorter extend and focus on commonplace, here and now and trivial topics. Story in both texts is not much developed and narration is characterised by reduction of motifs, condensation and elliptic verbal utterances, which in this way opens larger space for expressive illustration and whole visual effect of the book. In artistic space of minimalist texts by W. Erlbruch and J. Gaarder there is a main character, who copes with the fact of death or he/she is the object of dying. In spite of the fact, that in these two texts there are different author's strategies of capturing of the motifs (which are analysed in more detail in our paper), both small books are in their outcome an artistic portrayal of overcoming the reader's expectations, because they deviate from the scheme of happy ending. This minimalist artistic figurativeness of the motifs of pain and loss can outline the way for children in early age, how to cope with the pain caused by the death of a close person and how to make this difficult period of mourning less painful.