Tin Ujević
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Tin Ujević (July 5, 1891 – November 12, 1955) is considered to be one of the greatest Croatian poets of all times.
Augustin "Tin" Ujević was born in Vrgorac, a small town in the Dalmatian hinterland, and grew up in what were then provincial villages of Imotski and Makarska. He completed classical gymnasium in Split. Ujević spent turbulent Lehrjahre in the Zagreb bohemian milieu, in the circle of central figure of Croatian early modernism, revered and slandered doyen of fin-de-siècle aestheticism, Antun Gustav Matoš. Shortly embroiled in activities of nascent Yugoslav idealistic nationalism (1912 - 1916), Ujević quickly saw through it as a front for Greater Serbian expansionism[citation needed] and left politics for good, spending the rest of his life as a quintessential bohemian wanderer, residing and blasphemously rioting in Sarajevo, Mostar, Belgrade, Split and, finally, Zagreb.
Ujević distinguished himself in three fields: as a translator, essayist and feuilltonist and poet. He translated numerous works of poetry, novels and short stories into Croatian (Walt Whitman, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Benvenuto Cellini, George Meredith, ...). He wrote more than ten books of essays, poetry in prose and meditations — but his enduring strength lies chiefly in the monumental poetic opus.
Having absorbed virtually all Western poetic tradition (from Dante and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman and Ezra Pound) and all Croatian greats (Marko Marulić and Ivan Gundulić included), Ujević has created Protean poetic oeuvre of inimatable flavor and inescapable grandeur. His chief theme can be termed as — everything under the sun and beyond. From pantheist mysticism to humble Christian spirituality, from celebration of corporeality and ecstatic unity of human, non-human and the divine to the meditative repose, from ironic verses making burlesque of modern technology-driven civilization to the tender verbal music hallowing ancient Dalmatian hamlets, from powerful expression of erotic yearning to the resignation to the fates of human condition — Ujević's poetry is polymorphous vision of life, blend of often conflicting traditions ranging from Mediterranean ideal of harmonious beauty and modern existentialist sensibility expressed in the verses of unmatched virtuosity and profundity. He was in French Foreign Legion for 5 years[citation needed].
His main works include:
- Lelek sebra/Cry of a slave, 1920
- Kolajna/Necklace, 1926
- Skalpel kaosa/Scalpel of chaos 1938
- Žedan kamen na studencu/Thirsty stone at the wellspring, 1954
- Auto na korzu/Car on the street
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