Poetry
Svemir osobe
Not translated into English
Viktor Vida · 1951
Synopsis
Poems in which the speaker no longer knows what he is or where he is going: an enigmatic body as his only guarantee, a staircase dreamed at night among the living, ivy around the trunk, and a crack through which the word “I” threatens to fall. The motifs are those that occupied him all his life: God, the universe, love and death, Dalmatia and his native bay, the homeland and the foreign land.
Context
The collection appeared in Buenos Aires in 1951, three years after its author's arrival in Argentina and a year after he had found a modest office job there. It opens what critics call his second manner, tightened and closed, close to Italian hermeticism and to Quasimodo, some of whose verses he translated and about whom he wrote his best essay; a cycle of five poems published in 1942 had foreshadowed it by its spareness. Between 1942 and 1948 he had published nothing: Croatian critics call these years his creative silence. He gave his verses to a Franciscan monthly in the city, then to the émigré journal. A second book followed in 1956, and his poems were collected in the same city in 1962, two years after his death, by Vinko Nikolić.
Who it is for
Short, tight poems, hermetic in a way that comes not from the vocabulary but from the syntax. No French edition exists, and the work was read in its own country only after 1990.
Prizes and reception
Its publication, on the eve of that of the journal Krugovi, was a landmark in Croatian poetry, and its author is now considered one of the greatest of the century.
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