Graves Robert: Ja, Klaudije

Robert Graves: I, Claudius 

Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus survived the intrigues, struggles for supremacy and bloody purges during one of history's most violent periods - the collapse of the remnants of the Roman republic - because no one saw him as a threat to be removed. On the contrary, they called him idiot Claudius, stutterer, poor uncle... The family despised him and he withdrew and only observed the time in which he lived and recorded everything in his memoirs, including his sudden ascension to the imperial throne...

I, Claudius is the most successful historical novel by Robert Graves originally published 1934 and translated into dozens of world languages (the first Croatian translation by Isa Velikanović was published in Zagreb's Minerva as early as 1938). With this novel, Graves showed the entire world's literary public a magnificent literary talent, a perfect and precise knowledge and handling of historical material, and an astonishing imagination and ease in the reconstruction of events that were not recorded in historical sources.

Graves, perhaps more precisely than many other greats of world literature, described the core of the corruptive destruction that influence and power give to an individual carried away by the momentary favor of fate.

I, Claudius was included in the 14th place among the hundred best novels in the English language in the Modern Library edition, and Time magazine also included it in 2005 among the hundred best novels published from 1923 to the present day, in the same category. Therefore, it is not surprising that in this influential novel, on which generations of readers grew up, authors such as George R.R. Martin or David Chase, the screenwriter of The Sopranos, found inspiration for their characters.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) is one of the most respected and influential English poets of the 20th century, and as a novelist he achieved great success by popularizing historical themes in a completely non-trivial way. way, giving the characters of his novels contemporary liveliness and plasticity. 'I, Klaudie' is part of Sandorf's project of publishing the Selected Works of Robert Graves – updating the quality genre prose of high literary value by the great English stylist. The inspired translation of the novel is signed by Dinko Telećan, who in this edition also translated Poems – my choice, Homer's daughter and The White Goddess, for which he received the Iso Velikanović award for the best literary translation in 2017.