Bosnia and Herzegovina / All works
Poetry
Preobraženja
Not translated into English
Antun Branko Šimić · 1920
Synopsis
The only collection published by its author, the book brings together forty-eight poems, mostly short, some of which had appeared in magazines before being reworked. The lines are aligned on a central axis, in the manner of the German poet Arno Holz, and symmetry orders the whole book. God, love, death and the body, and poetry pass through a series of metamorphoses there, carried by typical figures, the sick man, the seducer, the seduced woman, the sleepwalker, the martyr, until all forms of life join an absolute conceived in pantheist terms.
Context
Published in Zagreb in 1920 and dedicated to Tatjana Marinić, whom he had met at the Faculty of Arts, this book is the only one the poet published. It opens a separate phase, after the free verse and telegraphic style of the years 1917 to 1919, and critics place it at the summit of recent Croatian lyric poetry, of which it is regarded as the cornerstone. The unemphatic expression, the use of colour without concern for imitation, the visual value of the sign and the use of the white of the page have become a lasting legacy. Three years later, the author set out his conception of the technique of the poem in an essay.
Who it is for
For those who like brief, spare poetry, where the arrangement of the lines on the page matters as much as the words.
Prizes and reception
Reissued on its own in 1981, it is counted among the high points of Croatian poetry; a selection of poems appeared in French in 2014.
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