Poetry in Times of Struggle: Walt Whitman and Young Bosnia

Aćamović, Bojana (2022) Poetry in Times of Struggle: Walt Whitman and Young Bosnia. TIES / Revue de littérature Textes, Images et Sons: Speaking in Tongues: Celebrating Walt Whitman in Translation (7). pp. 37-49. ISSN 2729-1596

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Abstract

The paper examines the pre-World War I reception of Walt Whitman’s poetry in the Serbo-Croatian linguistic and cultural space, focusing on the interest shown in the American poet by the members of the Young Bosnia circle between 1908 and 1913. Young Bosnia was a loosely connected group of young intellectuals and high-school students who shared ideas of national liberation and South Slavic unification, introducing revolutionary tendencies to the domain of literature, as well, voicing requests for the modernization of literary expression. Whitman was among the foreign authors that this group found particularly inspiring, and the translations of his poems which the Young Bosnians published were vital for promoting this poet’s work among the Yugoslav intelligentsia and are significant in the overall Serbo-Croatian reception. The paper aims to point to the importance of these translations in the wider cultural context of the time, when the Young Bosnians were actively involved in the struggle for national independence and cultural progress of the South Slavs.

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