Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP) 2014 This book attempts to present, in a comprehensive manner, the issues concerning the reception of poetry by France Prešeren, the greatest Slovenian poet of the Romantic period. The work focuses on...
moreLambert Academic Publishing (LAP) 2014
This book attempts to present, in a comprehensive manner, the issues concerning the reception of poetry by France Prešeren, the greatest Slovenian poet of the Romantic period. The work focuses on the issues of understanding, evaluation and interpretation. When analysing poems, it makes use of both the relevant scientific literature as well as the empirical tests. It also includes important extra-textual facts of the poet's life. France Prešeren (1800–1849) graduated in law in Vienna. He lived and worked in Ljubljana, and, due to his free thinking and Slovenian patriotism, was considered politically incorrect in the former Austria, and was admitted to the Bar only two years before his death. His best known poems are Sonnets of Unhappiness, Wreath of Sonnets and The Baptism by the Savica. He published a collection of his poems, entitled Poems, in 1847. The seventh stanza of his poem A Toast is the present Slovenian anthem. The highest award for artistic achievement is named after Prešeren and the date of his death is a national holiday. An empirical study of understanding The Baptism at the Savica showed that Slovenian high school students had notable difficulties in decoding the basic meanings of Prešeren's poem. In literature, didactics offer three methods of facilitating reception of complex classical poetry: linguistic modernisation, addition of notes, and transmission into prose. Due to the cult status of Prešeren’s poetry, modernizations can only be limited, while commenting hinders a spontaneous reading experience; as a result, only prosification entirely solves the problems of pronounced archaization, inverted word order and abundant metaphors in Prešeren’s lines. This was confirmed by an empirical study in which high school students, who read the prozification together with the verses from The Baptism at the Savica, attested a comprehension which was twice as good as comprehension of students who only read the poetry. The second chapter, referring to the school selection of Prešeren's poems, deals with the problem of evaluating Prešeren's poems. When selecting literary texts for secondary school reading books, the modern literature didactics recommend giving priority to the principles of reception and literary history. A study of the evaluation criteria of three leading experts on Prešeren from the second half of the 20th century brings recognition that, in spite of significant differences between them, literary historians, above all, value formally complex and receptively demanding poems belonging to the central period of Prešeren's romanticism. Although the influence of literary-historical principle is also noticed in secondary school students, these attribute the most value to Prešeren's poems with simple forms and less demanding reception, predominantly those that have a story, are easier to understand and provide a complete experience. Baptism at the Savica, an epic about the loss of Slovenian independence, can also be understood as a successful attempt by France Prešeren at how to outwit censors and use the form of a historic tale as a metaphor for expressing the content which, due to censorship, had to be omitted from his elegy Dem Andenken des Matthias Čop. Such an approach can help us resolve several apparent contradictions, shown in the interpretative history of the Baptism, such as the problem of Prešeren’s own characterisation of the poem in his letter to Čelakovský, or the question of Črtomir’s conversion at the end of the third part of this epic poem. In the 20th century, several interpretations came into being that understood Črtomir’s conversion to Christianity as an inevitable choice made by Slovenians in favour of a stronger, uniquely prospective Western culture circle, which serves as justification for Črtomir’s renunciation of freedom-loving Slovenianhood. According to the new understanding of The Baptism at the Savica, there are two Črtomirs, one is the hero and the other is the defeated one (the former, as he himself would like to be, is only an illusion by Prešeren, and the latter, as he indeed is, is the one with whom the poet completely identifies himself), and the final message of the epic poem is understood as a condemnation of cultural inequality.
