Fishing and Fishermen's Talk is the most important literary work of Croatia

Croatia

Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...

n Renaissance poet Petar Hektorović

Petar Hektorovic

Petar Hektorović was a Croatian writer.Hektorović was born and died in Stari Grad, Hvar. He was a poet and collector of Hvar's fishermen songs, and an important figure of the Renaissance period in Croatian literature...

, finished on January 14, 1566, and printed in 1568 in Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

. Ribanje is a pastoral and philosophic narrative poem in three parts in which Hektorović describes in a letter to his cousin, his three-day boat trip from Hvar

Hvar

- Climate :The climate of Hvar is characterized by mild winters and warm summers. The yearly average air temperature is , 686 mm of precipitation fall on the town of Hvar on average every year and the town has a total of 2800 sunshine hours per year. For comparison Hvar has an average of 7.7...

 to Brač

Brac

Brač is an island in the Adriatic Sea within Croatia, with an area of 396 km², making it the largest island in Dalmatia, and the third largest in the Adriatic. Its tallest peak, Vidova Gora, or Mount St. Vid, stands at 778 m, making it the highest island point in the Adriatic...

 and Šolta

Šolta

Šolta is an island in Croatia. It is situated in the Adriatic Sea in the central Dalmatian archipelago, west of the island of Brač, south of Split and east of the Drvenik islands . Its area is 58.98 km2 and it has a population of 1,675 .The highest peak of Šolta is the summit Vela Straža...

, accompanied by a pair of Hvar fishermen, Paskoje Debelja and Nikola Zet.

As a literary piece Ribanje has been variously classified in Croatian literary history as an epistle

Epistle

An epistle is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum. The letters in the New Testament from Apostles to Christians...

, as a fishermen eclogue

Eclogue

An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...

 or epic poem, and at other times as a documentary travelogue

Travel literature

Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...

.

According to its content Ribanje is the first piece of Croatian literature written in verse in which travel is not described allegorically, but as a real journey, describing the beauties of nature and homeland. It's a travelogue of a Renaissance man who enjoys nature and considers it to be a refuge for man's spirit where it can achieve complete relaxation and invigoration. Ribanje is the first described tourist journey of a modern, Renaissance man in Croatian literature; it is a first piece of Croatian culture in which world is described by parameters of human's concrete, earthly needs. To sum it up, Ribanje is the first secular, mimetic, realistic travelogue of Croatian literature.

In the poem the narrator—the poet himself—describes his journey across Adriatic islands and recounts events that he and his co-travellers experienced along the path. The narrator, great aesthetist and sensitive to beauty, often describes the landscape the company sailed through, admiring the beauties of his homeland.

The descriptive accounts of Ribanje combine the narrative parts in which events of the journey are detailed, along with the fishermens' complaints, dialogues and conversations. The poet-narrator often cites the conversation of the fishermen, quoting the truth, as he sees it, of their wise sayings and intelligent conversations.

Hektorović meticulously recorded the songs sung by the fishermen along the way, making this one of the earliest examples in Croatian literature to include transcribed folk music within the text. There are two bugaršćicas and three short songs, toasts or honorific songs, sung alternatively by the fishermen. This makes Ribanje a work that makes an interesting and aesthetically valuable synthesis, a blending of artistic and folk literature.

The work has been translated from Croatian to English as Fishing and fishermen's conversation by Edward Dennis Goy in 1979. In 1999 Matica hrvatska

Matica hrvatska

Matica hrvatska is one of the oldest Croatian cultural institutions, dating back to 1842. The name is somewhat idiosyncratic, best translated as "The Croatian Centre" . It is the largest publisher of Croatian language books...

 published a facsimile reprint of the edition princeps of Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje, with parallel translation to modern standard Croatian, conducted by Marko Grčić. The only two extant copies of the first edition are held at the library of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts

The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts is the national academy of Croatia. It was founded in 1866 as the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts , and was known by that name for most of its existence.- History :...

.

External links

• Fishing and Fishermen’s Talk in libraries (WorldCat
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  catalog)