THE TRANSLATIONS OF JUAN RAMÓN JIMÉNEZ'S POETRY INTO SERBO-CROATIAN: A GREAT POET (UN)KNOWN

Abstract

In Serbia and the Serbo-Croatian-speaking area, interest in the poetry of one of the most renowned contemporary Spanish poets, Juan Ramón Jiménez, emerged in the 1930s. This interest was ignited by translations in the Srpski književni glasnik (Serbian Literary Gazette), where translations of Jiménez's works by writer Ivo Andrić were also found in 1933. Thanks to the diligence of Croatian translator Nikola Milićević, in 1957, just one year after Juan Ramón Jiménez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first selection of his poetry in Yugoslavia was published in Zagreb, titled Dim i zlato (Smoke and Gold). Duško Vrtunski, a literary historian and translator, initially published Juan Ramón Jiménez's poems in literary magazines, and in 1972, he released a booklet called Lirika (Lyrics), the first Serbian translation of a collection of Juan Ramón Jiménez's poetry, published by the University Library "Svetozar Marković" in Belgrade, in an unusual, small format and modest print run. Like Milićević before him, Vrtunski achieved a highly convincing expression in translation, albeit without significant resonance among readership. The publishing house Rad from Belgrade released a selection of Jiménez's poetry Ja nisam ja: Pesme (I am not Myself: Poems) in 1977, translated by Raša Livada together with Nadežda Zarubica-Milekić. Due to Rad's reputation as a prominent and respected publisher and the publication’s wide circulation of 20,000 copies, Jiménez's poetry became significantly more accessible to Serbian readers by the end of the 1980s. Exactly thirty years after the publication of his first collection of Jiménez's works in Yugoslavia, in 1987, Nikola Milićević released a new, more extensive collection of poems by the Spanish poet titled Pjesme (Poems), published as a bilingual edition by Logos from Split and Milićević wrote a more substantial foreword for this occasion, providing readers with a more comprehensive picture of the poet.