Poetry
The Pit
Jama
Ivan Goran Kovačić · 1944
Synopsis
A man whose eyes have just been gouged out is led with the others to the edge of a pit. He can no longer see anything and reports everything: the steps in front of him, the sound of bodies falling, the taste of another man's blood left on his mouth. Then his turn comes. Ten cantos carried from one end to the other by this blind voice, whose very blindness makes the account more exact.
Context
The poem, ten cantos of rigorous construction, was already under way when its author took to the maquis in the last months of 1942, at the same time as Vladimir Nazor; he finished it there, and Vjekoslav Afrić first read it to the wounded of a division. The author was killed in July 1943, and the poem appeared the following year in five places at once, including Topusko, where the copies were bound in parachute cloth. The French edition appeared in Paris on 18 June 1948 from La Bibliothèque française, Louis Aragon's house: introduction by Marko Ristić, then ambassador of Yugoslavia, a poem by Paul Éluard as preface, an engraving by Pablo Picasso. It lived ten days: on 28 June, after the Cominform resolution, the French Communist Party had everything coming from Yugoslavia censored, and the book was withdrawn.
Who it is for
A long poem in a single movement, which reads quickly and holds up poorly. A French edition has existed since 1948.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the great texts of war literature, and the only one from its country to have been accompanied by a poem by Éluard and drawings by Picasso.
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