Ellen Elias Bursac on Tin Ujević

By Ellen Elias Bursac — Published on December 7, 2009

I would love to see the verse of Tin Ujević, a Croatian poet from the 1920s and 1930s, translated from the Croatian. He wrote jewel-like sonnets and other (mostly) short poems that fuse mysticism, pain, intellectualism, and insight with extraordinary rhymes. His work is still revered wherever Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian are spoken, but the poems have never been translated into English in a way that captures how they resonate in the original. His opus is not large, but it is a steep challenge.

Ellen Elias Bursac’s translation of Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugresic was recently published by Open Letter.

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