Poetry
Satir iliti divji čovik
Not translated into English
Matija Antun Reljković · 1762
Opening lines
Slavonijo, zemljo plemenita,
Vele ti si lipo uzorita,
Nakićena zelenim gorama,
Obaljana četirim vodama.
Slavonia, noble land,
How fair you are to see,
Adorned with green mountains,
Bordered by four rivers.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
A satyr come out of the woods of Slavonia addresses the peasants, reproaches them for their laziness, their ignorance and the customs they hold from the Turks, then teaches them how to plough, build, run their household and send their children to school. The character is not the author's invention: he takes it from a Polish didactic poem of the sixteenth century, read in captivity, in which a creature of the woods already lectures men on their way of life.
Context
The book was born in detention. Taken prisoner in 1757, the author spent his months of captivity in Frankfurt an der Oder, lodged with a private individual whose library was well stocked, and brought back from it the idea of instructing his province. The first edition appeared in Dresden in 1762 without the author's name, without place of printing and without printer's name, a pamphlet of eighty-two unnumbered pages. It at once provoked contradiction: two libels signed Momus and Nesmir Kudilović replied, and Vid Došen took up the defence of the book in 1767. The second edition, given in Osijek in 1779 by Martin Divalt, finally bears its author's name and introduces a new character, a Slavonian peasant who answers the satyr and tells him what he has changed at home.
Who it is for
Eleven cantos in decasyllables, in the Ikavian speech of Slavonia, with no French translation. It is worth knowing that the region had been retaken from the Ottomans only two generations earlier.
Prizes and reception
One thousand five hundred copies sold out in the first printing, an expanded edition seventeen years later: it is the book through which the Enlightenment enters Slavonia.