La Violoncelliste, Courtesy the artist Brigite Oury

Anyone who has travelled knows that apples taste
the sweetest on a street or on a square of some unknown city.
The reason lies in the fact that the city  does not expect

anything from you;

being neither an adult nor a child, you have promised it nothing,
ageless and free of obligations you are forgotten and unknown,
removed from your own body or language.

It is August. The end of August

and I’m thinking how it would be great to travel somewhere,
to Florence, or Siena, or Tuscany definitely,
chasing that fleeting moment of freedom – so ripe and glistening.

 

Translated from the Croatian by

Danijel Dragojević

DANIJEL DRAGOJEVIĆ (1934-2024) was born in Vela Luka on the island of Korčula, Croatia. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest Croatian poets of 20th Century. An exceptionally reflexive and innovative writer with a pronounced interest in the ontological, Dragojević successfully mixes the mundane with metaphysical. His early influences include Eugenio Montale, Henri Michaux and Gaston Bachelard. The range of his intertextual references expanded subsequently to include subjects as diverse as Presocratic philosophers, medieval Christian mysticism, John Cage and Martin Heidegger. For decades he was the editor of the highly influential feature Poetry Aloud!, broadcasted on Croatian National Radio 3rd Programme. His most famous poetry collections are Turtle and Other Landscapes (1961), In Your Real Body (1964), Storm and Other (1968), The Fourth Beast (1974), Natural History (1974), Figments (1976), The Carbon Age (1981), Observatory (1994), Walking Alongside Railway (1997), Murmur (2005) and Somewhere (2012).

Damir Šodan

DAMIR ŠODAN is a poet, playwright and translator, born in Split. He has published seven collections of poetry, three books of selected plays as well an anthology of Croatian neorealist poetry and the anthology of contemporary European poetry, Are There Any Poets in Monte Carlo (Croatian PEN, 2022).

Brigite Oury

Brigite Oury is a visual artist and lecturer in Visual Arts and Art History. She studied painting and art history at the Nantes School of Fine Arts and has exhibited her work in Paris and the south of France, where she currently lives. Oury’s practice is rooted in the constant renewal of her pictorial worlds, drawing on enclosed, dreamlike forms and the repetition of signs. She aggregates traces and symbols to construct improbable narratives—a world on the edge, suspended above the void, and in perpetual motion. Her work has earned her several painting awards. She is currently exploring a new body of work centered on the opulence of theater.