Poetry
Bugarkinje
Not translated into English
Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević · 1885
Opening lines
Maglovit vel kad još mi dušu vio,
Djetinjstvo kada grijali me danci,
Kad cvijeća žar mi svaki trn još krio,
I motali se svud još nevin-sanci:
When a misty veil still wrapped my soul,
When the days of childhood warmed me,
When the glow of flowers still hid every thorn from me,
And innocent dreams still whirled everywhere:
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Youthful poems, for the most part of an ardent patriotism: to Croatia, which opens the book and binds the homeland to the freedom of men, to the town of Senj and its fortress of Nehaj, to the judgement of history, to a martyr of the centuries, to a departed master; others go to a woman of the coast, and even love is patriotic there. Behind this fervour the struggle for the oppressed is already announced, along with the movement of the work to come, from man before his ancestors to the cosmos and God.
Context
The collection appeared in Senj in the last months of 1885, at the expense and on the presses of the printer M. Župan, while the author, back from Rome, was frequenting in Zagreb the writers of the party of the right. Dedicated to the memory of August Šenoa, it bears the stamp of that master and of August Harambašić, who dominated Croatian poetry in the 1880s, and it satisfied the conservative taste of the end of the century; the criticism of the time received it with caution, noting new accents in it. The linguist Milan Moguš devoted to its vocabulary a dictionary of 2,982 entries.
Who it is for
Verse in the patriotic rhetoric typical of the 1880s. It is better to know what August Šenoa meant to the young Croatian poets. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
First book of the man regarded as the greatest poet of Croatian realism, and the work that the Croatian Encyclopedia counts as the most notable of its author.
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