Ujević Tin: Pjesničke misli

Tin Ujević: Poetical Thoughts

Antun Gustav Matoš, Miroslav Krleža and Tin Ujević certainly make up the trio of the most important, most prolific and influential Croatian modern writers. 
Unlike, for example, the versatile Krleža, who tried his hand at almost all literary forms, Tin Ujević in his work focused on lyrics and essay writing (which also includes reviews, feuilletons, debates, articles and autobiographical records). As Miroslav Šicel points out, Ujević's poetry "already from the first two collections of published verses imposed itself as a vertical, in an aesthetic sense incomparably the best in the context of our entire poetic expression of the first half of the twentieth century, unattainable until today", and then he devoted himself more significantly to essay writing, in which he "will shine with an original wealth of associations, surprising reflections, great erudition and an astonishing breadth of knowledge: from the in-depth analyzes of our social and cultural life to knowledge of Eastern philosophies.«
Choosing (and thus necessarily summarizing) the most interesting quotes from the vast works of such titanic figures is always not only a demanding but also, to say the least, risky job. Namely, there is always a danger that a key sentence will be overlooked or that an important topic will remain unrepresented. This was especially evident in Ujević's case, whose Collected Works comprise as many as seventeen books, and the range of topics he wrote about is truly unparalleled in Croatian literature, as well as in the wider South Slavic and even Central European contexts. Dubravko Jelčić must have faced such doubts when he prepared a kind of encyclopedic edition (almost 700 pages!) of Tino's thoughts and views, so the organizers of this edition of ours (necessarily much smaller in scope and format) had to concentrate firmly on the context of Ujević's written legacy. politics, cultural history, spirituality, and especially about art, with an understandable emphasis on literature. We tried to include thoughts on universal topics that will be of most interest to the contemporary reader (e.g. man; soul; love; poet; solitude...), then those very specific to him (e.g. alcohol; bohemianism; hangover... and which change some common notions about the "café poet"!), but also those that are no longer particularly relevant today but were of great importance for Tin's intellectual and artistic development and without which it is not possible to adequately understand his work. This was most evident in the literary horizons: we included topics that remained and will always remain intriguing because we are talking about canonical authors, but also those that may have lost their meaning over time but were an important part of Tino's interests. In the effort to achieve such a balance, we did not leave out Orientalism, which Ujević was a kind of pioneer in these areas.
We hope that we have succeeded relatively in the three main goals of this edition: to outline the range of Ujević's intellectual sharpness and his literary (and especially stylistic) skill, and thereby encourage readers to reach for complete, integral texts of his; the older ones to visit them again, and the younger ones to embark on a unique adventure of the spirit undertaken by a man who, with reason, we usually call him - the great Tin, with the splendor of his talents.      - Denis Peričić