Poetry
Proljetna svitanja
Not translated into English
Vinko Nikolić · 1935
Synopsis
Early poems in the speech of Šibenik: the father's vineyard, the bitter bread this land provides, the streets of the town, the mother and the sea. Three circles take shape in them, which the poet will never leave: homeland, mother and the Mediterranean. Nothing in them yet announces the exile that will separate the speaker from all this for forty-six years.
Context
The collection appeared in Zagreb in 1935. Its author was twenty-three; he had given his first poems to a journal in 1931 but regarded as his true debut a collective book of ten poets that had appeared the year before. He would publish three more collections before 1945, and Croatian criticism regards these four books as his first period, that before the exodus. The language is that of his town: a Chakavian base mixed with Shtokavian forms, in which Ikavian and Ijekavian turns of phrase stand side by side, and it is his mother's language, which one of his lines says he drank with the milk. The subjects would not change afterwards: the native land, the mother, the sea, God, and later the return.
Who it is for
Short poems in a coastal speech that Croatian readers from the north approach with a glossary. No French edition exists.
Prizes and reception
The first of the four collections that make up the work from before the exile, and the one that all the author's bibliographies name first.
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