Alojz Gradnik

Infobox Writer
name = Alojz Gradnik

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caption =
birthdate = birth date|1882|8|3|mf=y
birthplace = Medana, Gorizia and Gradisca, Austria-Hungary (now in Slovenia)
deathdate = death date and age|1967|7|14|1882|8|3|mf=y
deathplace = Medana, Slovenia
occupation = Poet
genre =
movement = Decadentism, Symbolism, Magical realism
notableworks =
influences = Catul, France Prešeren, Simon Gregorčič, Josip Murn, Dante, Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine, Georg Trakl, Hugo von Hofmannsthal
influenced = Lili Novy, France Balantič, Jakob Savinšek, Kajetan Kovič, Cene Vipotnik, Jože Udovič, Brane Senegačnik, Aleš Šteger
website =
footnotes =

Alojz Gradnik (August 3, 1882 - July 14, 1967) was a Slovene poet and translator.

Life

Gradnik was born in the village of Medana in the Goriška Brda region in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today in the Goriška province of Slovenia. His father was a Slovene peasant who came from a poor family but created a considerable wealth by winemaking. His mother was a ethnic Friulian from the County of Gorizia and Gradisca.

Gradnik attended the prestigious multilingual State Gymnasium in Gorizia and then went to study law in Vienna. After graduation in 1907, he served as a district judge in the city of Pula, in Gorizia and in other smaller towns throughout the Austrian Littoral. In 1920, after the Italian annexation of the Julian March, he emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where he continued his career as a judge. In the late 1920s, he worked as an expert consultant at the Ministry of Justice in Belgrade. He was later appointed member of the High Court for the Security of the State, in which political trials were conducted. From 1936 and 1941 he served as a member of the "Bank of the Seven" ("Stol sedmorice"), the court of cassation which had jurisdiction on all former Austro-Hungarian parts of Yugoslavia. The court was located in Zagreb and during his stay in the Croatian capital, Gradnik enjoyed the company of Croat intellectuals like the writer Vladimir Nazor, historian Antun Barac, and poet Ivan Goran Kovačić.

After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, he was expulsed by the new Fascist authorities of the Independent State of Croatia. He moved back to Ljubljana. Between 1942 and 1943, he was internated in the Gonars concentration camp by the Italian Fascist occupation authorities. The concentration camp experience would strongly influence his later poetry. After the end of World War II, he returned to Ljubljana, where he spent the rest of his life as a pensioner. After September 1947, when the Slovenian Littoral was annexed to Yugoslavia, he regularly visited his native village, spending most of the summer season writing poetry.

Despite several love affairs in his youth, he spent most part of his life as a bachelor, never marrying.

Gradnik was a polyglot: besides Slovene, he was fluent in Italian, Friulian, German, Serbo-Croatian, English, and French. He also spoke Russian, Hungarian, Spanish, Latin and Ancient Greek and studied several oriental languages, such as Sanskrt, Pharsi, Bengali and Mandarin.

He died in Ljubljana.

Work

Gradnik was a prolific author. During his lifetime, between 1916 and 1944, he published nine collections of poems and left a large number of unpublished works. Together with Izidor Cankar and Ivan Pregelj, Gradnik belonged to those Slovenian authors which followed the first modernist generation in the Slovenian literature (Ivan Cankar, Oton Župančič, Dragotin Kette and others). Gradnik was most influenced by the work of the poet Josip Murn Aleksandrov, and was probably among the first ones who acknowledged Murn's poetic genious. As Murn, Gradnik incorporated impressionist visions of the countryside and peasant life into his poetry. Gradnik's style and vocabulary was simple, but his motives and contents complex.

Gradnik's early poetry was strongly inspired by both the older generations of Slovenian poets (the modernists, but also Simon Gregorčič and France Prešeren) and the European decadent movement. One of the specific traits of Gradnik's early period was his intense focus on the relationship between Eros and Thanatos: that is, between erotic passion and the motive of death. He later moved away from decadentism, rediscovered his Roman Catholic faith and turned to more mystical themes, maintaining a simple and plain language. He also wrote patriotic songs, in which he conveyed intimate sentiments of pain, hope and frustration for the tragedies in the contemporary Slovenian history. The Slovenian essayist Simona Škrabec compared Gradnik's late works to that of the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu.

Gradnik was also very influenced by the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. He wrote a book on the Slovene impressionist painter Rihard Jakopič. The and maintained a close friendship with the paintor Ivan Grohar, illustrators Riko Debenjak and Miha Maleš and with the sculptor Jakob Savinšek. Several painters strongly influenced his work, especially Eugène Carrière, Božidar Jakac and the Brueghels.

Gradnik was also an important translator. Among others, he translated the first two parts of Dante's "Divine Comedy" into Slovenian. He also translated works of other important authors, such as Francesco Petrarca, Giacomo Leopardi, Rabindranath Tagore, Giosuè Carducci, Romain Rolland, Omar Khayyam, Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Vuk Karadžić, Ivan Mažuranić, Petar Petrović Njegoš, Ugo Foscolo, Anton Chekhov, Juan Ramón Jiménez, John Erskine, Federico García Lorca, Sándor Petőfi, Endre Ady and others.

He also wrote children literature.

Influence and legacy

Today, Gradnik is considered to be the most important Slovenian poet in the interwar period, next to Oton Župančič, and one of the most important Slovene poets of the 20th century. In his lifetime, however, he was mostly disregarded by critics. With his traditional style and a conservative worldview, he remained outside the contemporary literary mainsteram. However, he influenced the work of some highly talented non-conventional authors such as Lili Novy and France Balantič.

After the establishment of a Communist regime in Yugoslavia after 1945, his position deteriorated. Gradnik was an anti-Fascist, he sympathised with the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, and even wrote several poems about the Yugoslav People's Liberation War in Slovenia. Nevertheless, his deep Christian religious sentiment and his magical realistic style were seen as reactionary by the Communists. His membership in the High Tribunal for the Security of the Security of the State, which condemned several Communist actvists, was a further reason for his fall into disgrace during Tito's regime. He did not suffer any persecution, but he was pushed away from public life. Between 1945 and 1967, he published mostly translations and none of his new poetry was published. There was no public commemoration upon his death and he was not included into the canon thought in schools. In Yugoslavia, no street or institution was named after him until 1990. Nevertheless, many of his poems gained much popularity in his home region and a local school in the Italian commune of San Floriano del Collio was named after him in the late 1970s.

He was rediscovered in the late 1980s, when he was elevated to a truly national poet for the first time. He became a major source of influence for the younger generations of postmodern authors, such as Brane Senegačnik, Nevin Birsa, Aleš Šteger and others.

Since the mid 1996, an annual festival is held in August in his home village of Medana, called "Days of Poetry and Wine" ("Dnevi poezije in vina"), to which young international poets are invited.

Bibliography

*"Padajoče zvezde" - ("Falling Stars", 1916)
*"Pot bolesti" - ("The Path of Sorrow", 1922)
*"De Profundis" - (1926)
*"Svetle samote -" ("Bright Solitudes", 1932)
*"Večni studenci" - ("Eternal Wells", 1938)
*"Zlate lestve" - ("Golden Ladders", 1940)
*"Bog in umetnik" - ("God and the Artist", 1943)
*"Pojoča kri" - ("Singing Blood", 1944)
*"Pesmi o Maji" - ("Poems about Maja", 1944)
*"Grozdje Girlande" - ("Garlands of Grapes")
*"Tolmin" - ("Tolmin")

ources

*Taras Kermauner, "Gradnikova pot k Bogu" (Nova Gorica: Zveza kulturnih organizacij, 1997).
*Fedora Ferluga Petronio, "Alojz Gradnik - Pesnik goriških Brd: mednarodni simpozij ob 125. obletnici pesnikovega rojstva", Primorski dnevnik, yr. 69, n. 113 (May 13 2007).
*Danila Zuljan Kumar, "Z referati osvetlili njegovo poezijo: Gradnikov simpozij na Univerzi v Vidmu, Briški časnik, y. 11, n. 47 (2007).