Dragotin chain

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Dragotin chain

Dragotin chain (born January 19, 1876 in Ilirska Bistrica , † April 26, 1899 in Ljubljana ) was a Slovenian poet of Impressionism and Neo-Romanticism .

Together with Josip Murn , Ivan Cankar and Oton Župančič , he is considered to be one of the founders of modern Slovenian literature and modernism . In addition, some of his fairy tales, fables and children's poems are internationally known to this day thanks to their translation into several languages.

Life

Dragotin chain was born on January 19, 1876 in the small village of Prem near what is now the Carniola district of the city of Ilirska Bistrica. This was part of Austria-Hungary at the time of his birth . His father Filipkette was a teacher and choirmaster; his mother died when the boy was four years old.

From 1888, Ketten attended the Ljubljana State Gymnasium. In 1894, his maternal uncle, Janez Valenčič, who was paying for Dragotin Kette's school fees, stopped his payments after his nephew received a prison sentence in a school newspaper for satirical poems about Bishop Jakob Missia . Chain then had to leave high school. He continued his education in Novo mesto , where he successfully completed his Matura exam in 1898 .

In Novo mesto he fell in love with the district judge's daughter, Angela Smola, during his high school years, to whom he dedicated some of his most expressive poems. Here he made the acquaintance of other young authors such as Ivan Cankar, Oton Župančič and Josip Murn, who introduced new elements in Slovenian literature: “Due to the socio-political situation that Slovenian does not have , through his entry into the secret student association Zadruga (cooperative) gave state political status, literature was seen as a national task and cultivated in conspiratorial clubs or groups ”.

After graduating from high school, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to Trieste. Some depictions simply coincide with James Joyce , Vladimir Bartol and Umberto Saba as evidence of the cosmopolitan aspect of the city of Trieste. Dragotinkette, on the other hand, saw an impoverished social climate in Trieste, which was expressed in his poem on the Venus of Trieste , in which he embodied a completely passive image of women. Here he fell ill with tuberculosis , which he succumbed to in April of the following year in a small slum on the banks of the Ljubljanica River, an empty sugar factory known as Stara Cukrarna , in Ljubljana in 1899 at the age of just 23. In the last weeks of his life he was cared for by his close friend Josip Murn, who would die of the same disease two years later.

The Cukrarna in Ljubljana , where Ketten died in 1899

Dragotin chain was buried in the Žale cemetery in the Bežigrad district of Ljubljana. When, in 1957, under Josip Broz Tito , consideration was given to renaming the above-mentioned Stara Cukrana , which had been redefined by modern poets as a cultural center, in Delavski dom (workers' home) Slovenske Moderne , the Association of Writers of Slovenia successfully opposed it. Because Cukrarna was already a synonym for the poverty of Slovenian modernism and therefore does not have to be replaced by a constructed coined name. As a compromise, a house nearby was given this name.

plant

Chain left only a narrow body of poems and stories for children. Nevertheless, along with his friends Ivan Cankar , Oton Župančič and Josip Murn , who supported him in the last months of his life, he is considered the founder of modern Slovenian literature. Kette's poetry was most influenced by Slovenian folk songs and the authors of the classical period, above all Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Heinrich Heine and France Prešeren . In addition, this was also expressed in that he gave preference to the sonnet and asserted a subjective structure in his poetry.

Through his friends he met the French Symbolists and Decadentists, in particular Paul Verlaine and Maurice Maeterlinck . However, he refused the latter. Instead, he chose an independent path, similar to that of other neo-romantic tendencies in Europe at the turn of the century.

The Molo San Carlo Pier in Trieste , namesake for a cycle of poems by Kette

His best-known works include the Impressionist poem Na trgu ( In the Square ), and a cycle of eight poems entitled Na Molu San Carlo . Dragogin chain is also known as a writer of popular children's literature. He wrote around 25 fairy tales , fables and poems for children, the three most famous being the fairy tale of the tailor and the little scissors or the magic scissor , the sultan and the dog and the bee and the bumblebee . This children's literature is widespread to this day and has been translated into German , Czech , Serbian , Croatian , Macedonian and Hungarian .

In contrast to his friend Josip Murn, Ketten established himself as a poet during his lifetime. After his death there were semi-official expressions of mourning and the mayor of Ljubljana, Ivan Hribar , attended Kette's funeral.

Dragotin Kette's collected poems were published in 1900. The editor was Anton Aškerc , at the time the most important author of the Slovene language, although he had previously rejected Kette's poems. Ivan Cankar and Oton Župančič sharply criticized the foreword by the older colleague, in which he stylized himself as the patron of the younger poet . This led to a public discussion in which the younger Slovenian writers challenged the aesthetic standards of the older authors in the person of Aškerc. On the first anniversary of Kette's death, Ivan Cankarkette published an important essay in honor of Kette. In it he emphasized that few journalists had noticed the great poetic talent that Slovenia had lost. Above all because he was the greatest talent since France Prešeren . Above all, this warning was to be understood against the background that both modern European and more recent Slovenian literature either did not appear in the authoritative national-liberal, monthly literary magazine Ljubjanski zvon ( Laibacher Glocke ), as in the first case, or as in the second case only more conventional texts were represented.

Dragotin chain had an important influence on the coming generations of authors from his homeland such as Alojz Gradnik , Srečko Kosovel , Miran Jarc , Ivan Minatti , Janez Menart , Kajetan Kovič and Ciril Zlobec .

However, the reception of all Slovenian poets was made more difficult by the fact that the quality of the translations was rather limited in the first anthologies of the 1930s: For example, Glonar, librarian at the State Study Library in Ljubljana, judged in 1933 that it was “not the language of contemporary German Poetry, but the language of textbook poetry and everyday hits ”.

Works (selection)

  • Šwalča a nožicy . Mladinska Knjiga, Ljubljana 1967.
  • Pesmi . Cankarjeva Založba, 2nd edition Ljubljana 1984.
in German translation
  • The magic snake . Translated by Anton Svetina. Illustrations: Jelka Reichman, M. Pawlak 1985. ISBN 3-881-99198-0

Adaptations

Audio book

literature

  • Antun Barac, Miodrag Vukić (ed.): History of Yugoslavian literatures from the beginning to the present . Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1977, ISBN 3-447-01874-7 .
  • Ivan Cankar: Dragotin chain . In: Bela krizantema. Mladinska knjiga, Ljubljana 1966, pp. 16-28.
  • Silvo Fatur: Dragotin Chain - Prem . Občina, Ilirska Bistrica 2000.
  • Matjaž Kmecl: Na svetli strani moderne chain . Slavistično društvo Slovenije, Ljubljana 2006.
  • Juraj Martinović: Poezija Dragotina Kettenja . Slovenska matica, Ljubljana 1976.
  • Janez Mušič: Dragotin chain . Mladika, Ljubljana 1993.

Web links

The common grave of Cankar , Murn andkette in the Žale cemetery
Commons : Dragotin chain  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Dragotin chain  - sources and full texts (Slovenian)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the position within the Slovenian national movement, Robert A. Kann: A history of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918 , University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1974, p. 530.
  2. ↑ Klaus Amann, Johann Strutz: The literary life . In: Herbert Dachs u. a. (Ed.): History of the Austrian federal states since 1945. Vol. 2, Carinthia: from the German border mark to the Austrian federal state . Böhlau Verlag , Vienna 1998, p. 563.
  3. ↑ http://www.kam.si/slovenske_pespoti/kettejeva_pot.html
  4. ^ Prem, Dragotin Chain's Birth House, Old School
  5. ^ Katja Sturm-Schnabl: The literary coffee house in Lubjana / Laibach (1890-1950) . In: Michael Rössner (ed.): Literary coffee houses, coffee house literary figures . Böhlau Verlag, Vienna a. a. 1999, p. 200.
  6. ↑ See Vlado Kotnik: Opera, power and ideology. Anthropological study of a national art in Slovenia . Ljubljana, p. 161.
  7. ^ Anna Campanile: The Torn Soul of a City: Trieste as a Center of Polyphonic Culture and Literature . In: John Neubauer: History of the literary cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and disjunctures in the 19th and 20th centuries . Volume 2. John Benjamin Publishing Company Amsterdam et al. a. 2004, p. 159.
  8. ↑ http://www.dedi.si/dediscina/36-cukrarna
  9. ↑ Monika Stromberg: An example of how to build socialism. Ljubljana between European heritage and socialist revolution after 1945 . In: Margit Franz u. a. (Ed.): Mapping contemporary history: Zeitgeschichten im Diskurs, Volume 1. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2008, p. 137.
  10. ↑ On the role within Slavic modernism: Péter Krasztev: Central and Eastern European Symbolist Literature and Its Projects . In: Ástráður Eysteinsson, Vivian Liska (Ed.): Modernism . Vol. 2, John Benjamin Publishing Company, Amsterdam 2007, p. 884.
  11. ↑ On the status of Slovenian modernism, Oto Luthar: The land between: a history of Slovenia . Peter Lang Verlag, New York a. a. 2008, p. 360.
  12. ^ Anton Slodnjak: Slavic floor plan . De Gruyter, Berlin 1958, p. 30.
  13. ^ France Bernik: Slovenian literature in a European context . O. Sagner, Munich 1993, p. 18.
  14. ↑ Andrej life: Ljubjanksi zvon . In: Stefan Simonek (Hrsg.): The Viennese Modernism in Slavic periodicals of the turn of the century . Peter Lang Verlag, Bern et al. 2006, p. 185.
  15. ↑ See John K. Cox: Slovenia: evolving loyalties . Routledge, New York 2005 p. 21.
  16. ↑ Matjaž Klemenčič, Mitja Žagar (ed.): The former Yugoslavia's diverse peoples: a reference sourcebook . ABC-CLIO, 2004, p. 68.
  17. ↑ Rudulf Andrejka: From Slovenian poems, Vienna 1932.
  18. ↑ Joža Glonar: Slovenian narrator. Nova Založba, Laibach 1933, p. 46, quoted here from: Erwin Köstler : From the cultureless people to the European avant-garde: main lines of translation, presentation and reception of Slovenian literature in German-speaking countries . Peter Lang Verlag, Bern u. a., p. 162.
personal data
SURNAME Chain, dragotin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Slovenian poet
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Ilirska Bistrica
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1899
Place of death Ljubljana