FAMOUS CROATS 2005 - 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF DRAGUTIN TADIJANOVIĆ

Welcoming the 100th birthday of Dragutin Tadijanović There are but few fortunate people who live to see and go through the hundredth birthday in good spiritual and corporeal health. There are countless pages written about the hardships of old age, and there are not many that can be adorned by old age, if for no other reason than on account of their wisdom. “Old age will tell, many years will show wisdom” says the Book of Job. Preserving health depends less on the man chosen among the fortunate ones who have managed to sustain optimism and confidence in every new day throughout their long life, which definitely depends on luck but also on the temperament of the individual who expects the advent of every new day, month and year with confidence. In the past they used to speak of such fortunate people as of the favourites of gods. It is easy to believe that Dragutin Tadijanović, too, is the favourite of our God, the only, just, humanitarian God that gives long life and perpetual wisdom to those he had chosen. The poet Dragutin Tadijanović is rather special considering his work, life, activity – and his longevity can be counted among those special gifts – to the joy of those he meets, talks to, teaches – sometimes even corrects something that people much younger than him have forgotten, and which is deposited firmly and reliably in his memory. Dragutin Tadijanović is old – he is aged one hundred years – but by his approach to life, his grasp of existential values, by his way of addressing both the old and the young – he only has many years he can count, but he is not old, not like the old men we often meet, whom we never ask about their age because it is evident from the way they walk and talk, their deliberation, because such people have been abandoned somewhere in the timeless wilderness of oblivion and they fail to accept novelty. Tadijanović does not belong amongst them. He was born in Rastušje near Slavonski Brod on the 4th of November 1905, when the Roman Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Saint Carlo Borromeo, the legendary bishop of Milan, restorer of religious life in northern Italy. The small village of Rastušje has become, thanks to the poet, the best known Slavonian village. He started going to elementary school in the somewhat far-away Podvinje, having to go there on foot. He attended grammar school in Slavonski Brod, being accommodated in the old Franciscan monastery. This might be the reason he accepted the admiration and honouring of all the living creatures, the same that was characteristic of Saint Francis. Tadijanović started the study of forestry in Zagreb, but failed to complete it because enrolled his course of study at the Faculty of Philosophy, against his father’s will, and graduated in 1937. He started writing very early. In 1922 one of his poems was published under the pseudonym Margan Tadeon. The first poem under his real name was published in the edition of Matica Hrvatska, Hrvatska revija (Croatian Review) in 1930. Starting from that time he has published more than 500 poems so far, and he knew how to choose titles for his collections of poetry that would reveal the world of his poetic engagement: Sunce nad oranicama (Sun above the plough-fields) Pepeo srca (Ashes of the heart), Tuga zemlje (Sorrow of the earth), Blagdan žetve (Harvest feast), Srebrne svirale (Silver flutes), Prsten (Ring), Prijateljstvo riječi (Friendship of words), Kruh naš svagdanji (Our daily bread). Disregarding the fact that these are also titles of his poems, the titles on the front pages of his always neatly fitted-out books clearly tell us how much he himself values his poetic word and how much he respects those who will take his books into their hands and read them with attention and joy. Literary critics and historians determined that there were no essential changes in his poetry, neither in the structure of the verse, nor were there any break-downs at the level of motive and theme, nor in the building up of his easily memorized sentences. Yet, despite this, each of his new poems was built into the great opus of the poet Tadijanović, thus building up the “magnum opus” of the overall Croatian poetry. He was identically convincing as a poet when he wrote about the high-grown yellow corn, about his grandmother giving her blessing to the corn, or when he wrote about mister Lamijan feeding the pigeons, all through to the poem Večer nad gradom (Evening above the city), where he writes about himself in Florence. There, on the square named after the great artist Michelangelo, he remembers Rastušje and his mother, comparing in his memory the hands of the great artist with the hands of his mother and sisters who used to store the crops all by themselves. The circle of his view kept getting wider, and from the village he turned to his city of Zagreb, next to Paris, the sea, the world, to whatever can create the word that would last as a remembrance to the people and the times that have passed so mercilessly and had gone forever, so it would become necessary to think of the time ‘when I am gone’ – the poem entitled Kad mene više ne bude... Dragutin Tadijanović, as opposed to numerous other poets was particularly sensitive when it came to other poets’ words, trying to draw them nearer to the readers by poetic translations or new and suitable editions. He translated foreign poets into Croatian, selected and arranged poetry collections of Croatian poets, made critical arrangements of the complete works of some more recent Croatian poets (Matoš, Vidrić, Kamov, Kranjčević, Goran Kovačić, Ujević) and thus became part of the modest but important circle of textual critics of the recent Croatian literature. Judging by the number of published collections and the two editions of his collected works, Petoknjižje (‘Pentateuch’), there is no Croatian home where there are no books of his. The beauty of his poetry, the benevolence of the great word artist – all these are the basis on which generations of Croatian children and young people have been and still are raised, those that will both read and write and transfer the Croatian word in years and centuries that follow.