Poetry
Đulabije
Not translated into English
Stanko Vraz · 1840
Synopsis
A cycle of quatrains addressed to a young girl met in Samobor: the beauty of the woman they name, the landscapes in which the poet imagines her, waiting and doubt, and the same fervour that runs from the woman he loves to the country she makes him love. She had a first name that the poet changed to another, softer one, and it is under that name that she has remained in this literature; she married another man three years before the book appeared.
Context
The first pieces appeared in the journal Danica from 1837 and were not collected in a volume until 1840, in Zagreb, under a full title that presents them as offerings of love to the woman they name: this volume contains the first two books of the cycle, the other two appeared after the death of their author and are dedicated to the homeland. The avowed model is the great poem by the Slovak Ján Kollár, published in 1824, whence comes the central motif, the love of a woman and that of the homeland taken as one. The form is a rarer borrowing: the krakowiak, a six-syllable quatrain from Polish popular song, which the collection brings into the language and which the Croatian Romantics took up after it. The title is the name of a variety of sweet apple, a word that came from Persian through Turkish.
Who it is for
Short quatrains, with no difficulty of language, to be read straight through rather than one by one: it is the sequence that makes the book. No French translation has appeared.
Prizes and reception
The first intimate lyric collection of Croatian literature; since 1990, an annual festival of love poetry in Samobor has borne the name of the woman to whom it is dedicated.