- Alojz Gradnik
Infobox Writer
name = Alojz Gradnik
caption =
birthdate = birth date|1882|8|3|mf=y
birthplace =Medana ,Gorizia and Gradisca ,Austria-Hungary (now inSlovenia )
deathdate = death date and age|1967|7|14|1882|8|3|mf=y
deathplace = Medana, Slovenia
occupation = Poet
genre =
movement =Decadentism ,Symbolism ,Magical realism
notableworks =
influences =Catul ,France Prešeren ,Simon Gregorčič ,Josip Murn ,Dante ,Shakespeare ,Heinrich Heine ,Georg Trakl ,Hugo von Hofmannsthal
influenced =Lili Novy ,France Balantič ,Jakob Savinšek ,Kajetan Kovič ,Cene Vipotnik ,Jože Udovič ,Brane Senegačnik ,Aleš Šteger
website =
footnotes =Alojz Gradnik (
August 3 ,1882 -July 14 ,1967 ) was a Slovenepoet andtranslator .Life
Gradnik was born in the village of Medana in the Goriška Brda region in what was then the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today in theGoriška province ofSlovenia . His father was a Slovene peasant who came from a poor family but created a considerable wealth bywinemaking . His mother was a ethnic Friulian from theCounty of Gorizia and Gradisca .Gradnik attended the prestigious multilingual State Gymnasium in
Gorizia and then went to studylaw inVienna . After graduation in 1907, he served as a districtjudge in the city ofPula , in Gorizia and in other smaller towns throughout theAustrian Littoral . In 1920, after the Italian annexation of theJulian March , he emigrated to theKingdom of Yugoslavia , where he continued his career as a judge. In the late 1920s, he worked as an expert consultant at the Ministry of Justice inBelgrade . He was later appointed member of the High Court for the Security of the State, in which political trials were conducted. From 1936 and 1941 he served as a member of the "Bank of the Seven" ("Stol sedmorice"), thecourt of cassation which had jurisdiction on all former Austro-Hungarian parts of Yugoslavia. The court was located inZagreb and during his stay in theCroatia n capital, Gradnik enjoyed the company of Croat intellectuals like the writerVladimir Nazor , historianAntun Barac , and poetIvan Goran Kovačić .After the Axis
invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, he was expulsed by the newFascist authorities of theIndependent State of Croatia . He moved back to Ljubljana. Between 1942 and 1943, he was internated in theGonars concentration camp by the Italian Fascist occupation authorities. The concentration camp experience would strongly influence his later poetry. After the end ofWorld War II , he returned toLjubljana , where he spent the rest of his life as a pensioner. After September 1947, when theSlovenian Littoral was annexed to Yugoslavia, he regularly visited his native village, spending most of the summer season writing poetry.Despite several love affairs in his youth, he spent most part of his life as a bachelor, never marrying.
Gradnik was a polyglot: besides Slovene, he was fluent in Italian, Friulian, German,
Serbo-Croatian , English, and French. He also spoke Russian, Hungarian, Spanish,Latin andAncient Greek and studied several oriental languages, such asSanskrt ,Pharsi , Bengali and Mandarin.He died in Ljubljana.
Work
Gradnik was a prolific author. During his lifetime, between 1916 and 1944, he published nine collections of poems and left a large number of unpublished works. Together with
Izidor Cankar andIvan Pregelj , Gradnik belonged to those Slovenian authors which followed the firstmodernist generation in theSlovenian literature (Ivan Cankar ,Oton Župančič ,Dragotin Kette and others). Gradnik was most influenced by the work of the poetJosip Murn Aleksandrov , and was probably among the first ones who acknowledged Murn's poetic genious. As Murn, Gradnik incorporatedimpressionist visions of the countryside and peasant life into his poetry. Gradnik's style and vocabulary was simple, but his motives and contents complex.Gradnik's early poetry was strongly inspired by both the older generations of Slovenian poets (the modernists, but also
Simon Gregorčič andFrance Prešeren ) and the Europeandecadent movement . One of the specific traits of Gradnik's early period was his intense focus on the relationship between Eros andThanatos : that is, between erotic passion and the motive of death. He later moved away fromdecadentism , rediscovered hisRoman Catholic faith and turned to moremystic al themes, maintaining a simple and plain language. He also wrote patriotic songs, in which he conveyed intimate sentiments of pain, hope and frustration for the tragedies in the contemporary Slovenian history. The Slovenianessayist Simona Škrabec compared Gradnik's late works to that of the Catalan poetSalvador Espriu .Gradnik was also very influenced by the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. He wrote a book on the Slovene impressionist painter
Rihard Jakopič . The and maintained a close friendship with the paintorIvan Grohar , illustratorsRiko Debenjak andMiha Maleš and with the sculptorJakob Savinšek . Several painters strongly influenced his work, especiallyEugène Carrière ,Božidar Jakac and theBrueghel s.Gradnik was also an important translator. Among others, he translated the first two parts of
Dante 's "Divine Comedy " into Slovenian. He also translated works of other important authors, such asFrancesco Petrarca ,Giacomo Leopardi ,Rabindranath Tagore ,Giosuè Carducci ,Romain Rolland ,Omar Khayyam ,Jovan Jovanović Zmaj ,Vuk Karadžić ,Ivan Mažuranić ,Petar Petrović Njegoš ,Ugo Foscolo ,Anton Chekhov ,Juan Ramón Jiménez , John Erskine,Federico García Lorca ,Sándor Petőfi ,Endre Ady and others.He also wrote children literature.
Influence and legacy
Today, Gradnik is considered to be the most important Slovenian poet in the interwar period, next to
Oton Župančič , and one of the most important Slovene poets of the 20th century. In his lifetime, however, he was mostly disregarded by critics. With his traditional style and aconservative worldview, he remained outside the contemporary literary mainsteram. However, he influenced the work of some highly talented non-conventional authors such asLili Novy andFrance Balantič .After the establishment of a
Communist regime inYugoslavia after 1945, his position deteriorated. Gradnik was ananti-Fascist , he sympathised with theLiberation Front of the Slovenian People , and even wrote several poems about theYugoslav People's Liberation War in Slovenia. Nevertheless, his deepChristian religious sentiment and his magical realistic style were seen asreactionary by the Communists. His membership in the High Tribunal for the Security of the Security of the State, which condemned several Communist actvists, was a further reason for his fall into disgrace duringTito 's regime. He did not suffer any persecution, but he was pushed away from public life. Between 1945 and 1967, he published mostly translations and none of his new poetry was published. There was no public commemoration upon his death and he was not included into thecanon thought in schools. In Yugoslavia, no street or institution was named after him until 1990. Nevertheless, many of his poems gained much popularity in his home region and a local school in the Italian commune ofSan Floriano del Collio was named after him in the late 1970s.He was rediscovered in the late 1980s, when he was elevated to a truly national poet for the first time. He became a major source of influence for the younger generations of
postmodern authors, such asBrane Senegačnik , Nevin Birsa,Aleš Šteger and others.Since the mid 1996, an annual festival is held in August in his home village of Medana, called "Days of Poetry and Wine" ("Dnevi poezije in vina"), to which young international poets are invited.
Bibliography
*"Padajoče zvezde" - ("Falling Stars", 1916)
*"Pot bolesti" - ("The Path of Sorrow", 1922)
*"De Profundis" - (1926)
*"Svetle samote -" ("Bright Solitudes", 1932)
*"Večni studenci" - ("Eternal Wells", 1938)
*"Zlate lestve" - ("Golden Ladders", 1940)
*"Bog in umetnik" - ("God and the Artist", 1943)
*"Pojoča kri" - ("Singing Blood", 1944)
*"Pesmi o Maji" - ("Poems about Maja", 1944)
*"Grozdje Girlande" - ("Garlands of Grapes")
*"Tolmin" - ("Tolmin ")ources
*
Taras Kermauner , "Gradnikova pot k Bogu" (Nova Gorica: Zveza kulturnih organizacij, 1997).
*Fedora Ferluga Petronio, "Alojz Gradnik - Pesnik goriških Brd: mednarodni simpozij ob 125. obletnici pesnikovega rojstva",Primorski dnevnik , yr. 69, n. 113 (May 13 2007 ).
*Danila Zuljan Kumar, "Z referati osvetlili njegovo poezijo: Gradnikov simpozij na Univerzi v Vidmu, Briški časnik, y. 11, n. 47 (2007).
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