Bosnia and Herzegovina / All works
Poetry
Stojanka majka Knežopoljka
Not translated into English
Skender Kulenović · 1942
Synopsis
A poem written in 1942, during the war of liberation, on Mount Kozara, in north-western Bosnia. A peasant woman of Knežopolje, Stojanka, mourns her three sons, Srđan, Mrđan and Mlađen, killed in the enemy offensive. The poem follows the model of the folk lament, and the mother's grief becomes a call for vengeance and a song of life and of the land.
Context
The poem was born of the war on the Kozara, at the time of the German and Croatian offensive against the region's uprising; it was written in a day and a night. Published in volume form in Sarajevo in 1945, by Svjetlost, it was for a long time learned by heart in the schools of the six Yugoslav republics. In 1974 the author's inaugural address at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts bore its title, and the composer Boris Papandopulo set it to music for soprano, choir and orchestra.
Who it is for
For reading the great Bosnian war poem, long recited by schoolchildren; no French or English translation of it is known.
Prizes and reception
Ivo Andrić praised it, and Konstantinović judged its popular poetic force unequalled in the Yugoslav poetry of its century.
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