Poetry
Suze sina razmetnoga
Not translated into English
Ivan Gundulić · 1622
Synopsis
The son who has squandered everything turns back upon himself in three stages: what he has done, what he understands of it, and what remains to him when he has nothing left to grant himself. Each of the three bears a name, the fault, the knowledge, the contrition, and the poem passes from one to the next by setting against each other, two by two, what damns and what saves. The son of the sacred story is not shown from the outside: his lament is the whole poem, and the father he has left stands for God.
Context
The poem appeared in Venice in 1622 and was reprinted the very next year. It consists of three named laments, which take the reader through the three states of Christianity: sin, repentance, redemption. Everything in it proceeds by contrasts, death and life, defilement and purity, hell and heaven, and the relation of father to son stands for that of man to God. The genre had just spread through Catholic Europe, and Dubrovnik gave it three representatives, this one, then another in 1630 and a third in the following century. Its author had published the year before his versions of several psalms of David. It was Ivan Mažuranić who, two centuries later, completed the unfinished epic of the same author by composing the two missing cantos.
Who it is for
A short poem, in three parts, in the language of seventeenth-century Dubrovnik. It helps to know the parable from the Gospel.
Prizes and reception
The most widely read devotional text of the Republic of Ragusa, and the model that the country's penitential poets followed for more than a century.