Poetry
Zore i vihori
Not translated into English
Vesna Parun · 1947
Synopsis
Poems written in the aftermath of the war, in four parts that move from light to night: the summer of a childhood on the island, the autumn rains, then the dead still close at hand, and finally mourning. The body, love, and a voice that refuses to celebrate what it was then asked to celebrate. The title expresses this division: dawn for a lively, sensitive youth, the squall for what swept it away.
Context
The collection was published in 1947 by the Society of Croatian Writers, under the direction of Gustav Krklec, with a cover by Edo Murtić, who the same year illustrated Ivan Goran Kovačić's poem The Pit (Jama). Its author had begun it in 1938, at the age of sixteen. It earned her accusations of intimism and of rejecting socialist realism, which, in the Yugoslavia of that year, amounted to being sidelined: she never held a post, lived on little and was often housed by friends. A historian of Croatian literature nevertheless called its publication the real event of postwar poetry. She went on to publish more than sixty books, and her collection of 1955, built on the triangle of love, birth and death, is the one that critics place at the centre of her work.
Who it is for
Vehement poems, in language free of obscurity, in four parts that move from light to dark. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
The book that got its author shut out of the institutions of her country, and which did not stop her from becoming the most widely read of its poets.
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