Veli Joze

Vladimir Nazor

Description

'Veli Joze' by Croatian author Vladimir Nazor (1876-1949) is a fantasy story of a giant who spends his life serving the townspeople and Venetian nobility of the hilltop village of Motovun in Istria, Croatia. His struggle for freedom from servitude and to live with the few remaining giants of the land involves myths, legends, dragons, witches, magic and other supernatural elements. Nazor's most famous story was first published in book form in 1908. Nazor later refined and adapted this text for children and it has been part of educational reading material for decades. This English translation was made using the original unedited 1908 version, and includes the supernatural elements, as well as the original illustrations. Also included is Nazor's personal account of how he created the character of Veli Joze based on his experiences of Istrian life during the first years of the 20th century when this part of the world was under the rule of the Austrian Empire. This is the first time an English translation has been widely available.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839784842
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Veli Jože
– an Istrian story
 
by Vladimir Nazor
Illustrations by Saša Šantel
 
Translated from the 1908 Croatian edition
Copyright to this translation © 2022 Martin Mayhew
Design and layout by Martin Mayhew
www.martinmayhew.com
All rights reserved
 
ISBN: 9781839784842
 
 
Contents
Foreword
Istria
Veli Jože – an Istrian story
I
II
III
IV
About Vladimir Nazor
About Saša Šantel
Notes by the translator

 
 
 
Foreword
 
(1930 introduction by Vladimir Nazor)
 
I don’t know how – at least not in this field of work – to create anything worthy from mere duty alone.
When it did happen to me that I had to – even before something matured in me by itself – respond to some open or mute call, whatever I did it didn’t come out well, not even when I exhausted myself over it.
This also happened to me in Pazin in 1904.
It was at that time that I saw that our people in Istria do not have their own written history, not even something that they know how to talk about, and they know almost nothing about those mediaeval castles and manor houses whose ruins are seen mainly in the valley between Lupoglav and the source of the Raša. Therefore, I began the quite exhausting search for and study of everything that the Italians and some Germans – even if it was only one-sided – had presented about past events in the Istrian land. I considered it my duty to receive as much as possible, from anyone, and to give it all immediately to those who were expecting something from me, in an easy to read fictional form, and even using the words which could be – in that region and precisely for those people – the most accessible.
But I didn’t succeed.
Neither the ballads Krvava košulja ( The Bloody Shirt , Pula, Krmpotić, 1905), nor the historical novel Krvavi dani ( The Bloody Days , Zagreb, Scholz, 1908), nor the sonnets Istarski gradovi ( Istrian Towns , the Great Cyril-Methodius calendar of 1907, Zagreb, Klein, 1906) were capable – with all the weight of their historical data – to convey something because in them I spoke in a way which wasn’t mine and about things that I had only read about! Those ballads and that novel were removed long ago – completely and forever – from the collection of my literary works, and I don’t know myself whether some of these sonnets may find some kind of small place again if I was to review and reorganise all the things in the structure of my verses once more.
I fulfilled my “duty” to Istria a little later, in Koper, in another way.
 
*
 
Koper, once the seat of the governor, who administered the Venetian part of Istria, is a small Italian town 1 with small-winged lions on the walls of old buildings, with a few great-grandchildren of the once numerous and wealthy Venetian nobles, one of whom even to this day is said to have never – in his older days – stepped over the threshold of his father’s palace without standing on soil which no longer belonged to the La Serenissima. In this town there are also peasants, settled long ago from regions of the ex-Venetian Republic, whilst it would be difficult to come across an inhabitant of our blood and language in it. However, vegetables and milk are bought, in the morning hours, on the square, and eggs, cheese and “homemade” bread are also sold on the doorsteps of houses in the villages all around, by our people. Our people enter the little town early in the morning and, almost silently, do their business, then immediately disappear. They move through Koper as though in someone else’s house and they resemble more the subjects who carry a tribute of food to the lord than the villager-sellers who elsewhere can sometimes be too liberal in communicating with the customers, even if some of them were gentry. I also saw such submissiveness and despondency in our villagers towards the townspeople in the heart of Istria, but it was right in Koper that I best saw that it was something ugly – still untouched by recent times, barely shaken by our national movement – in the relationship between the Croatian Istrian countryside and an Italian or semi-Italian Istrian town or small town.
I suddenly felt that I had found myself with open eyes in front of the thing which, until then, I was looking for in vain in history books and in my own earlier wanderings through Istria. Why in that novel and those ballads did I speak about some romantic occasions in old fortresses and manor houses, when, right at that time, in village houses and barns, the soul of the One, who still hadn’t spoken for himself and about which still nobody knew what to say, began to emerge?
Why – in the midst of many other things – were the newcomer Ivan Sinković, and the Lutheran Stjepan Konzul, and the baron outlaw from the village of Kršan, and the dog-headed 2 knight from Vranja below Mount Učka, in my novel from past days, at the time when He had already grown, who had settled the karst and the fields and the gorges and the shores of Istria, and had cleared and ploughed, sowed and planted, and populated all of them with cattle, and even now feeds the towns – of which, the old ones, here are crumbling, there again, new ones are sprouting up – still bringing them His effort and hard work, standing also on the square or in front of the doors as a subject who carries a tribute to the lord.
I finally realised that I should write about Him.
However, He is a little bit here and a little bit there but on the whole nowhere. He has a thousand faces and a thousand names. He is fragmented into countless drops like dew on a meadow. I would go so far as to say that each of its parts – even the smallest one – has its own soul. You feel Him, but you cannot, from anywhere, see all of Him just as you cannot see all of a river, the sea or a mountain. And as though you are not able to see Him – whole – in space, you cannot grasp Him – whole – at once in time either.
I then realised about whom my book of Istria had to talk. I finally sensed my true “hero”, but how was I to join up all the creases and wrinkles into the lines of one face, all of his sorrow and mischief into the feelings of one soul, so that I could look straight at Him in front of me as a complete, single piece? On which native land should I settle all his homes, and in which moment should I sum up all the days of his life?
For me, a new, maybe more difficult, search emerged.
I thought that I would also suffer in vain this time, when instead I had found what I needed, in a strange way, and in a place where I hadn’t expected.
 
*
 
Around the Easter holidays, I went early in the morning, for the second time, to Motovun, a little old town encircled by ramparts at the top of an isolated hill. In front of it is a wide basin valley, behind it a forest through which a river seems to barely crawl down towards the sea. There was silence in the copse, on the water and in the lethargic little town where the faces of the natives had turned pale and were full of boredom just like the façades of their ancient houses. Work is sluggish and apathetic in the little Italian town, whilst all around and further afield our villagers come out of their dotted about, little houses to cultivate the land, chop down trees and graze livestock. Looking from above, from the town, not a murmur is heard: the Mirna River was quiet, the forest had fallen silent in the shelter of the breezes, and the ploughmen and shepherds are so far away on the plain, that you can’t even hear the clang of field tools or the voice of the people or the animals. I wished for that peace and greenery; I set off not actually thinking about what I was looking for.
But it turned out differently.
There was already a crowd of people from the nearby little towns and villages in the carriages of the narrow-gauge railway train.
Recruiting in Motovun!
I found the little town full of people, mostly our villagers. They were huddling in the shade in front of the church, on the ramparts and alongside the tall tower; sitting on the doorsteps of houses, under the arches of narrow streets; waiting for the conscription to begin. Fathers, and even many mothers, had accompanied their sons. Many of them were tired and dusty from walking, almost all worried and quiet. Motovun’s little traders had opened their shops and they went around the people offering all kinds of wares. However, the villagers had everything they needed in their bags, so the townspeople became angry, teasing them with scornful jokes, chasing them from everywhere. But the villagers endured everything, moving around, keeping quiet and looking at their sons who would now, in the town hall, in front of the commission, undress. I am gripped with rage, but I don’t know who I am angrier with: with the spiteful and caustic little traders or with the persevering human cattle. There was nobody anywhere whom I could stop and, at least, complain a little. But, today is the day when even the strictest gendarmes let the young men, who will soon enter the emperor’s service, do all kinds of things, and there: look!
I pottered around the cramped little town, and already by noon I turned down the road to the train station below the hill and then onto the tavern to sit and wait for the train that will take me back to Koper. Motovun was already above me when I heard steps behind me. A little old man was hurrying down the hill stumbling slightly worse for wear from wine, but even more so from some trouble which he could barely control. When I replied to his Italian greeting in Croatian, he immediately joined me and opened his heart to me. Oh no! They took his only son, while he – Zuan Grbljina – is old, and his Barbara, with her legs forever swollen. So, he had got drunk to make it easier to bring his wife the bad news. His son was in Pula for four years, on a warship, and the two old people were in an empty house next to their uncultivated land. How sad! A disaster!
“But