keep your head down, you follow your nose, you fool around,

you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night with a better

alternative for a phrase running through your head, you turn

the light on and scribble it down for fear of forgetting it, you

recheck it next morning, you revise, you polish – and sometimes,

if you’re lucky, one or two poems do come out right.

Of course, I felt it at all times necessary to transmute Tin’s

form

, in both the narrow and broad senses. At the micro-level,

his patterns of rhyme, rhythm, melopoeia and so on, and at the

macro-level, his overall musicality and sense of number, measure

and measurement, are integral to his poems and inseparable from

their overall meaning – though number and measure of course

come in at all other levels too. At any rate, without rendering

all these elements, Tin’s genius gets lost. ‘Meaning’ is in no way

reducible to ‘literal meaning’.

•

Born in 1891 in Vrgorac, a small town in the Dalmatian

hinterland, Tin grew up in Imotski and Makarska, and attended

the classical gymnasium in Split. His language and sensibility are

indelibly marked by the rugged beauty of the Dalmatian littoral,

that narrow, sunbaked, rocky coastline, backed by mountains,

facing out over the Adriatic sea and the islands of Hvar, Brač

and Korčula. So, for example, in

‘

Slaboća’

(‘

Frailty’), he writes

longingly of “našem plavom, plavom valu,/...našem bijelom,

bijelom žalu” (translated as “the waves of our blue blue sea, / and

white, white pebbles”).

Although Tin’s major achievement is as a lyricist, his

oeuvre

is

much broader than lyric alone. He was a writer of profound and

discerning intellect, broad and capacious interests, inquisitive

appetite and eclectic range. His

Collected Works

number sixteen

volumes, including poems in many forms, from free verse to the

Whitmanesque

verset

, prose-poems, essays, criticism, aphorisms,

a book of thoughts and jottings compiled into a personal

‘encyclopedia’, and translations of fiction, poems and plays by

authors as various as Poe, Whitman, Verhaeren, Rimbaud, Gide,

Conrad, Meredith and Benvenuto Cellini, among others.

9

Tin spent many years living in Zagreb, as well as periods

in Split, Sarajevo, Mostar, and Belgrade. In his youth, his

involvement in the Pan-Slav movement to establish a Yugoslav

state earned him the disapprobation of the Austro-Hungarian

authorities and the close attention of their police. From 1913

to 1919, he lived in exile in Paris (Montparnasse), where he

mingled in the same milieu as other radical writers, artists

and intellectuals from Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, as well as

such figures as Picasso, Modigliani, Cocteau, Ehrenburg, and

d’Annunzio.

Throughout his life, he lived simply. Well-known as an

anarchic bohemian, he was a frequenter of bars and cafés,

and always poor. Typical photos show him wearing a battered

and ramshackle trilby cocked at a lopsided angle. Affectionate

anecdotes about him abound, whether true or apocryphal, like

the one I heard about him from poet-friends in Kragujevac,

Šumadija, the Serbian heartland. It goes like this: Tin is sitting

in a bar with friends, blindfold, tasting wines from all over

Yugoslavia and identifying them. He sips half a dozen samples

in turn, swirls each one around his mouth, and names all of

them in quick succession without a single mistake. Then some-

one thrusts a glass of water into his hands. He takes a slurp.

“No, I don’t recognize that one,” he says. Other stories aren’t so

salubrious. There’s one about him taking off his hat, picking two

fleas out of his hair, and inviting his friends to place bets on a

race between them across a café table. Apparently, he spent five

years in the French Foreign Legion, though I haven’t yet found

out when or where he served.

•

Tin’s most celebrated lyrics are those in the collection

Kolajna

[

The Necklace

] (1926), the

tour-de-force

‘Svakidašnja jadikovka’

(‘Daily Lament’) as well as several other poems that first appeared

with it in

Lelek sebra

[

Cry of a Slave

] (1920). The poems in this

small introductory selection are taken from these two books.

Tin’s poems of the 1920s are immediately approachable in thei

surface lucidity and simplicity. Every poem is interpretable as a

formally composed container or vessel from which an interior

feeling emerges. And if it is a truism that exploration and ex-

pression of subjectivity are part and parcel of all lyrical poetry,

what particularly characterises Tin is that the feeling itself appears

to be allowed ‘out’ and ‘up’ in the very instant of being felt; or,

rather, it is released, simply and clearly, in the precise act of being

apprehended. That is to say, it is expressed directly, with neither

resistance nor hesitation, and certainly with no need of filtration

through the kinds of self-irony, emotional reticence or linguistic

gamesmanship that mark a good deal of modernist and post-

modernist writing. There is artifice, to be sure, and it is of a high

order: Tin is far too sophisticated a poet ever to be interpretable

as a naïf. Once (or, rather, if ) this point has been accepted, it

then becomes evident that his artifice operates so unobtrusively

that it

implies

an effortless spontaneity and sincerity. At this level

of reading, then, if there is an impression of transparency in

Tin’s lyrics, this becomes convincing and genuine thanks to his

artifice.

•

The crafted quality of Tin’s lyrics is often flawless and their

perfection of musicality is comparable, I think, to that of

Verlaine. Among all the gems in his ‘necklace’ of poems, it is

fitting, I think, to end these introductory notes by drawing

particular attention to the first poem in this selection, ‘Daily

Lament’ (‘Svakidašnja jadikovka’). Unrhymed, but with an

inescapable, incessant, pounding rhythm, it insists, with slow

inevitability, on successive waves of feeling that tumble over one

another in rapid succession, oscillating between unease, anxiety,

angst, anger, anguish and despair. Here is a poem that, from

the point of view of both subject matter and tone, takes every

imaginable risk. It is, in all senses, on the edge. At the same time,

in its modulation, pace and emphasis, the patterning is flawless.

I don’t believe there is a human being, however sanguine, who

hasn’t at some time felt something of what it

11

is perhaps most astounding about it is the vitality, vigour and

dignity that pulse through it: even in the fullness of its diatribe

against life’s pains and difficulties, in its beat, its breath, it is

paradoxically most full of life. This poem is generally agreed to

be Tin’s lyrical masterpiece. It is universally powerful.

Richard Berengarten

Cambridge, July 2012

r

7

Tin Ujević, Lyricist

The Croatian poet Augustin (Tin) Ujević (1891-1955) is one of

the finest Southern Slav lyric poets and one of the great poets

of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. While Tin

Ujević’s poems are hardly known in English, they are loved in his

native Croatia and throughout former Yugoslavia. I say ‘loved’

advisedly. I don’t mean just admired or respected. 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. This is mainly because people brought up in the various

Yugoslav republics learned some of Tin’s poems at school. What

is more, the sincerity of affection for him as a poet and as a man

is evident even today in South-Slavic countries, especially in the

tendency still to refer to him by his pet-name, Tin. And just as

the topics of his poems are intimate, and his poetic personality

comes across as endearing and sympathetic, so readers in his

own language experience and share an intimate response to his

poems and feel that they ‘know’ the ‘real’ Tin too.

When I first went to live in former Yugoslavia in 1987, the

poems of Tin’s that I first came across, as might be expected,

were his most anthologised pieces. In Split, 1987, Daša Marić

asked me to try translating some of these best-known poems, and

because my Croatian at that time – or rather, my Serbo-Croat

– was a beginner’s, she helped me by making literal versions,

which we worked from together. Later, in Belgrade and then in

Cambridge, I became more or less proficient enough to translate

several more poems alone.

Tin’s art is delicate, highly crafted, akin to that of filigree.

Translation of a poet as intricate as he is sometimes works,

sometimes doesn’t. You try things out, one after another, you