Poetry
Nove pjesme
Not translated into English
Petar Preradović · 1851
Opening lines
Odkad, dušo, ti mi ode
Mome oku iz okruga,
Na srce mi pade tuga
Kao mraz na jadan cviet.
Since you, my soul, went away
Out of the circle of my sight,
Sorrow fell upon my heart
Like frost upon a wretched flower.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from archive.org
Synopsis
Poems of homeland, love and meditation, in which recur the boat that must be steered alone, the days without light and a hope that he treats as a person. The speaker is a man long kept far from the country whose language he sings: an officer of the imperial army raised in German, he had had to relearn Croatian in order to write, and several of these pieces have remained in the country's schoolbook memory.
Context
The book appeared in Zagreb in 1851, five years after a first collection published in Zadar. Its author had just been posted to the Croatian capital as aide-de-camp to Ban Josip Jelačić, and he worked in a singular manner: the verses often came to him in the language of the army, and he then rendered them into Croatian and went over them with his friend Ivan Trnski. Croatian criticism regards this second book as a step back from the first; what it grants it is a new, fatalist tone, to which belong the pieces most often cited from it, Mon bateau, Le Jour noir and Espérance. The poems of this collection and the previous one were gathered in Zagreb in 1873, the year after their author's death.
Who it is for
Short poems, romantic but not obscure. No French edition exists; German produced two selections, in 1875 and 1895, and an Italian selection appeared as early as 1866, in the poet's lifetime.
Prizes and reception
Its author was hailed in his lifetime as the poet of the nation, and his name was put forward in 1871 for the office of ban of Croatia, which he declined, being too ill.