Tin, Verhaeren, teh Forgotten

The subject of this paper are Ujević’s poetic translations (»Sunce u čovjeku«, Zora, Mala biblioteka, Zagreb, 1951) by the Belgian/French poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916). The text gives motivational indications which demand a wider and further elaboration. This is poetry which reverberated in Europe and further at the beginning of modernism and civil prosperity at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It reflected optimism of economic, scientific and technological prosperity of the world and the »ocean feeling« of a Beethovenly embraced humanity. World War I reflected this prosperity, but to Ujević this feeling remained as a banked up poetic hope amidst the hard times, just as Verhaeren’s biography remained an unacknowledged model of how he himself wished to live. After World War II Ujević took Verhaeren’s poems as a motif and poetically translated them in his way, uniquely, in a Tin manner, with a coloured linguistic feeling. It cannot be defined as a real translation, but Tin’s independent creation, moreover, a real masterpiece of Ujević’s work and a very valuable, but neglected contribution to the development of the new Croatian poetic expression where Tin symphonically breaks the barriers of his own poetic format