Poetry
Smrt Smail-age Čengića
Not translated into English
Ivan Mažuranić · 1846
Opening lines
Sluge zove Smail-aga,
Usred Stolca kule svoje,
A u zemlji hercegovoj:
Smail-aga calls his servants
Within his tower in Stolac,
In the land of Herzegovina:
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from hr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
An Ottoman aga collects taxes in the mountains of Montenegro, with the brutality that has made his reputation. Among the captives he brings back are a man of his own faith and that man's son. What he does to the father decides the son, who goes off to join those of the rocks; at Cetinje a small band gathers, an old priest blesses it and tells it that its march is holy.
Context
The subject is a real event: the levying of the harač carried out among the Drobnjaci, in the autumn of 1840, by an Ottoman chief from Herzegovina, and what followed. The poem was composed in Karlovac in 1845, partly at the request of Dimitrija Demeter, and appeared the following year in the almanac Iskra. It runs to one thousand one hundred and thirty-four lines, octosyllables and decasyllables mixed, divided into five cantos, each with a title: the fourth alone has six hundred and twenty-three, the last thirty-four. Its author wrote not another line afterwards and gave himself entirely to politics. The text appeared in French in a journal as early as 1878, in book form in 1927, and two new translations have followed, in 2011 in Paris and in 2015 in Ottawa, the latter in a bilingual edition.
Who it is for
Five cantos that can be read at one sitting, and two recent French translations, one with the Croatian en face. It is best to know what the harač was, the tax owed to the sultan by his Christian subjects.
Prizes and reception
More than a hundred and sixty editions, regarded as the summit of Croatian poetry of the nineteenth century, and the first Croatian text to appear in French in book form, in 1927.