Marulić’s Latin version of Petrarch’s canzone Vergine bella (created about 1510-1511, printed in the Evangelistary of 1516) is important as a testimony to Marulić’s knowledge of his great poetic ...model and his skill in turning his celebrated poem into the eminent medium of the Latin elegiac couplet. In addition to this, it is to this poem that the short but very interesting dedication to Jerolim Papalić is appended; in this Marulić puts forward his views about translation.
A detailed comparison of the translated version and the original has already been made by Francesco Lo Parco, long ago in 1931; attention was paid in this work to Marulić’s poetic sources. Since that time, practically nothing has been written about this important document of the Croatian reception of Petrarch.
Nevertheless, the importance of this poetic encounter and the richness of the translation or version do suggest the need for further interpretation. Although Marulić’s way of translating can hardly be reconciled with our current concept of transmission of material from one language to another, the contemporary reader cannot, in spite of all Marul’s amplifications and deviations, refrain from admit-ting that Petrarch’s canzone and Marulić’s translation are the encounter of two geniuses, and that the Latin version is in many respects quite up to the original: those areas in which it deviates do not diminish the value of Marulić’s work; on the contrary, taken as a whole, the translation does honour to Marulić and the Croatian tradition of Latinism.
This paper summarises research about and new evaluations of Marulić’s works in the last decades of the 20th century. Since the perspective theory, to repeat Eco, warns that every reading can lead to ...a new understanding, and the creation of a new significance for the text, this can also apply to Marulić’s multi-lingual works, published as Opera omnia Marci Maruli. The paper shows how much Marulić was an active and equal participant in the Humanist literary events of the 15th and th centuries, here, on this restless and belligerent edge of the European space. Marulić, we now know much better, was not an adherent of any one literary genre, or of one conception of life and mood, but a creative mind sensitive of and available to, in line with the ideals of Humanism, very various human challenges. All this is backed up with reference to Davidiad, Evangelistarium, De institutione, De humilitate et gloria Christi, The Glasgow Poems, and Repertorium.
The paper gives, once again, an answer to the question of the metaphor of “the father of Croatian literature”. It is known that there were almost four centuries between the Baπka Tablet and Marulić, and they were far from devoid of literary work. None of the pre-Marulić writers in Croatian literature is excluded by the definition; father here implying the classic, the monumental, maturity in the broadest European dimensions. Marulić’s work reconciles two fundamental requirements of greatness: breadth of involvement in the tradition, and inexhaustibility of duration in time, or, that is, a selected national tradition worked upon until it attains universality.
Marulić too, following the example of Jesus, used the parable, knowing that virtuous lessons usually enter more effectively into the souls of simple people through the means of some or other images ...and comparisons. Just as the Davidias should be read allegorically, Marulić as a whole should be revealed and accepted in the same way, according to the Renaissance measure and conviction that every reading is a plunge into the heart, into the essence, the text wrapping up the kernel, the core, the meaning that is, like a shell. Using the example of the 39th Parable, On death which is common to all, the tripartite nature of Marulić’s tale is valorised: a) the image-tale; b) the explanation; c) part of the explanation as conclusion. But, as against Marulić (in whom man lives in the permanent environment of death, life being transitory and human-kind having to take constant account of the end) in later Croatian poets this relation-ship is altered. What earlier filled the poet and reader with fear becomes a source of ebullience. Marulić’s writing is a copy of human life, an explanation of it, its being given sense even in death. Poetry of the Marulić type, his description of things and events (there also being a desire to stress the meaning) is called the poetry of the core. Later poets in Croatia have given themselves over to refined sensibility of expression, more and more concerned for the decoration, the shell. Finally, works of art of both the earlier and the modern period are understand primarily as a unity of internal and external mimesis, of the core and the shell, content and form.
