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Sanja Lovrenčić’s book presents biographical texts by anonymous authors from the 13th and 14th century that depicted the lives of troubadours. Medival biographical texts about troubadours are a very old testimony about the interest that lives of artist awakened in their contemporaries. In a time where the only biographies written were those of saints and important rulers, poets are the only group of people that defy that rule – by being written about. Their biographies were written in a language that in medieval times, among others, was called “lenga d’oc”. Today this language is mostly referred to as Occitan, and it is considered to have been Europe’s first literary language after the classical period.
Format: 11,5×17
ISBN: 978-953-7199-40-1
Number of pages: 128
Hardcover with dustjacket
Published: 2008.
A literery testimony of an outward and inward journey by the renowned Swiss traveler and writer. What could have eassily become a simple travelogue becomes a diary of a slow sinking into loneliness, fever, exotic beauties and deadly menaces of a “chimerical island” – Sri Lanka. Combining humour and poetry, N. Bouvier created penetrating, unforgettable literary images.
The text of these Notes flows like a mountain stream or breeze: it describes scenes from writers’ residences in which the author stayed for a little over a year, and the reflections associated with these places make up the bulk of the book. These are notes about the journey, woven with the subtle skill of a top connoisseur of language and working with words. Atmosphere, associations and images are innumerable; thoughts, questions – we recognize them all, we ask ourselves all that. But here and there, as when the folds of a fabric are separated by a gust of wind, readers see that this is not all: from the notes made between the trips they catch hints of the horizon of harsh and stupid reality that led the author to go on the road again and again. “You cover reality with a veil and you see better,” she writes in this book. Traveling with clear thoughts and open eyes, Sanja Lovrenčić covers and reveals reality with a unique fabric woven of words. (Iva Valentić, ed.)
A collection of twenty short stories written simultaneously with the first poems that made the fame of Dylan Thomas. Creating his dense web of images, the young author is dealing (not without irony) with the big issues, life and death, love and madness, interweaving Welsh countryside and motives of local legends in impressive texts that defy all categorization.
Sanja Lovrenčić wrote the book of prose fragments entitled Zagreb Childhood in the Sixties while she was working on the translation of Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical Berlin Childhood around 1900,and her writing is therefore marked by an interesting duality. Zagreb Childhood functions as an autobiographical discourse and deals with the elements typical for that genre: introspection, sketches of the chosen period, a fine nostalgia for childhood, which an adult can reach only as a selection of fragments that can never be made into a coherent whole; those elements could be labelled as personal and local. On the other hand, however, the book is a response to a literary text, a reaction not to a childhood or a social change, but to a certain type of writing. This leads to a completely different set of ideas, that we might call inherently literary – intertextuality, the fictionalization of the self, the use of poetic language and lyrical fragments that simultaneously connote and transcend personal experience. Thus Zagreb Childhood combines two elements that are necessary to make a quality literature: inclusion in the local context, as well as its constant dissolution – both intimacy and universality.
