Twelve Poems
SynopsisPlot
While Tin Ujevic's poems are hardly known in English, they are loved in his native Croatia and throughout former Yugoslavia. At least until the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation, many of Tin's lyrics were known by heart and quoted by people all over the country, even those who weren't particularly literary, in much the same way as some of W.B. Yeats's early poems, like 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' and 'Down by the Salley Gardens', are known and quoted all over Ireland and the UK.
Story
About this book
Augustin Ujevic, known as Tin Ujevic, was a Croatian poet born in 1891 and active through the first half of the twentieth century until his death in 1955. This small English-language collection presents twelve of his poems, offering a rare point of entry for readers outside the South Slavic world. Ujevic is widely regarded as one of the finest lyric poets to have written in Croatian, and his reputation extends across the region that once formed Yugoslavia.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, many of Ujevic's lyrics were memorized and quoted by ordinary people across the former Yugoslav Federation, not only by dedicated readers of poetry. The record compares this broad cultural presence to the way certain early poems by W.B. Yeats circulate in Ireland and the United Kingdom, where lines are passed along by people with no special interest in literature. Despite this deep familiarity in his home region, Ujevic's work remains little known in English.
Twelve Poems is a bilingual or translated selection that tries to bridge that gap. It sits at the intersection of Croatian literary tradition and the wider European poetry of its era, a period shaped by two world wars and shifting borders across southeastern Europe.
