Poetry
Lirika
Not translated into English
Dobriša Cesarić · 1931
Synopsis
Poems of extreme transparency: a waterfall that turns into light, a cloud the sunset sets ablaze for an instant, a lit window under a roof. Nothing in them is explained, and sadness is never named. The book does not collect everything: its author kept in it two thirds of the pieces he had published in journals, and would discard still more later.
Context
The collection appeared in 1931, at the author's own expense. Its author was twenty-nine and had been giving verse to the journals since he was fourteen; he gathered in it forty-five of the sixty-five pieces published up to then. He wrote one hundred and sixty-five in all, returning constantly to the same ones and reworking them from one edition to the next. The method is constant: an image taken from the ordinary world, set down without comment, and a reversal in the last two lines. Many of his pieces have been set to music, and a critic called him the most musical of Croatian poets. They have passed into all the Slavic languages, then into English, German, French, Spanish, and even Latin and Esperanto: he is one of the most translated Croatian poets.
Who it is for
Very short pieces in simple language, which Croatian schoolchildren learn from the first grades. No French edition of the collection exists, but individual poems have been translated.
Prizes and reception
Crowned the following year by the Yugoslav Academy as the best collection of the year, it made its author one of the founders of modern Croatian poetry.