Vesna Parun

Biography

Vesna Parun’s first poem, “Pramaljeće” (“Early Spring”), appeared in the Catholic magazine “Anđeo čuvar” (“Guardian Angel”) in 1932. She was ten, and she wrote it on the island of Vis.

She was born on 10 April 1922 on Zlarin, near Šibenik. By other accounts the date is 4 October, but April is the one usually given. Her father, Ante, a native of the island of Prvić, was a municipal clerk who was repeatedly transferred or left without a post, and there were four children in the family. As a girl she spent a good part of her childhood and youth with relatives in Split, Biograd na Moru and Šibenik. She finished primary school on Vis, attended secondary school in Šibenik and Split, and took her school-leaving examinations in 1940. She was an excellent pupil and from the age of fourteen earned her own living by tutoring. In the autumn of 1940 she enrolled in Zagreb at the Faculty of Philosophy (Filozofski fakultet), to study Romance languages. The war followed: flight to Split, a return to Zagreb in 1942, life in Sesvete, where her father worked for the municipality. Her brother joined the Partisans and was soon killed. After the war Parun resumed her studies, now in philosophy, and graduated in 1946; her studies were interrupted along the way. In 1947 she worked on the construction of the Šamac–Sarajevo railway.

She has been publishing since 1945. “Dawns and Whirlwinds” (1947) sets youth, love and nature against death and the destructive force of war. The socialist-realist critics (adherents of the official post-war doctrine in the arts) judged the book “apolitical” and “decadent”. It seems to me that what irritated them was precisely that the poems were of no use to the ideological poetry of the post-war years. In Croatian poetry the book is regarded as a landmark. Her next collection, “Poems” (1948), received the prize of Matica hrvatska, the Croatian cultural society.

From 1947 Parun lived as an independent writer. She wrote poetry, essays, criticism, prose, plays and books for children. She translated from Slovene, German, French and Bulgarian. Beginning with the collection “Black Olive Tree” (1955, awarded the City of Zagreb Prize), love became her main motif. Then came “Vidrama vjerna” (1957), “Coral Returned to the Sea” (1959), “The Wind of Thrace” (1964), “Gong” (1966), “Ukleti dažd” (“The Enchanted Rain”, 1969), “One Hundred Sonnets” (1972) and “Apocalyptic Fables” (1976). From the 1960s, alongside the lyrics, she wrote satirical verses on politics and on the erotic. She wrote several dramatic works, among them “Marija i mornar” (“Marija and the Sailor”, 1960); four of her plays were staged. Her children’s books number more than twenty. The best known and most often staged is “Mačak Džingiskan i Miki Trasi” (“Genghis Khan the Tomcat and Miki Trasi”, 1968), for which she received the Grigor Vitez Prize. Some of her books Parun published, printed and illustrated herself.

From 1962 to 1967 she lived in Bulgaria, mainly in Sofia. She wrote poetry there, gave recitals and made friends among Bulgarian poets and intellectuals, including Radoy Ralin, Blaga Dimitrova and Vanya Petkova. The Bulgarian authorities falsely accused her of spying for Yugoslavia, and in 1967 she was forced to leave. She never returned to Bulgaria, but her name is known there to this day.

Her awards include the annual Vladimir Nazor Award (1959), the Nazor Award for lifetime achievement (1982), the title Poeta Oliveatus (“poet crowned with olive”) at a festival in Selca on the island of Brač (1995), the Tin Ujević Award for the sonnet collection “Suze putuju” (“Tears Travel”, 2003) and the European Literary Award of the town of Vršac (2010). Croats regard her as the most prominent woman poet of their country in the second half of the twentieth century. She was the first in Croatian literature to live by writing alone.

She spent many years in Zagreb, in the student quarter in Dubrava. In 2000 she moved to Stubičke Toplice, where she remained. There she celebrated her last birthdays and wrote several more books. Vesna Parun died on 25 October 2010; she is buried in the old cemetery by the church of St Stephen in Grohote on the island of Šolta.