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Echoes of the oldest Croatian Poetic Miscellany in the Verses of Marulić
Dragica Malić
orcid.org/0000-0003-0981-5831
Sažetak
This paper investigates Marulić’s connections with the heritage of Croatian medieval literature and the language of literature. Reverence is made to the echoes/ traces of the oldest known writings of anonymous Croatian medieval poetry from the glagolitic Paris Miscellany in Marulić’s Croatian verses. The Paris Codex itself (from the National Library in Paris, shelf number Code slave 11) was probably created in some Benedictine monastery in Split or surrounds around 1380. The dating is determined according to its calendar and paschal tables, and its affiliation to the Benedictine circle of the wider Split area is based on an analysis of the language and contents of the poems. The main parts of the codex (selected missal, breviary and ritual fragments) are written in a Croatian redaction of Old Church Slavonic common in liturgical works, but the poems written before the end of it belong linguistically to the central Dalmatian Ikavian version of Chakavian, here and there permeated with individual elements of Church Slavonic. The Paris Miscellany contains ten poems, seven of them in folk octosyllabics, one in dodecasyllabics and two in free verse with the occasional rhyme.
In Marulić’s verses it is possible to find primarily echoes of that universally known folk medieval octosyllabic poetry, in poems in which he himself inherited the medieval topics, above all those relating to the New Testament and eschatology. There are the fewest traces of these vernacular medieval poems in the most mature of his poems, Judith and Susana (and even in the Miracle Play of the History of Saint Paphnutius), founded on Renaissance poetics and secular sources of poetic images and similes. However, in Marulić it is also possible to find individual traces of the »non-vernacular« poems from the Paris Miscellany.
The subject of this investigation is not medieval themes and medieval motifs as such; rather the linguistic and poetic or versification elements of their realisation in the Croatian medieval poetry and in Marulić are considered. Croatian medieval poetry, in creating its poetic utterances and effects, makes use of simple linguistic means (collocations, phrasemes, amplifications, oppositions and contrasts, comparisons and such like linguistic procedures and properties), often using clichés and commonplaces, which enabled the people to take part in public religious events. Such often repeated simple poetic means were put by Marulić too into his verse, and thus he made them close and more easily acceptable to his readers. The numerous parallels drawn between the Paris Miscellany and Marulić show the duality of Marulić’s procedure in making verse: sometimes he draws very directlyon a medieval source, sometimes he transforms it, elaborates it, expresses it with very close and yet different linguistic resources. For example god is always Bogjedini – in the Miscellany and in Marulić, but in the Miscellany he is always ki vse more i vse čini and in Marulić he sve more/može, but also svaka more, and his kripost svaka more; he is also svemog, by him svaka postaju... For Jesus from the Miscellany – ki je zemļu, nebo stežal, Marulić has: zemļu s nebom ovi složi; nebo, zemļu ki je stvorio. For the Mother of god, who in the Miscellany nebes otvorila,Marulić says: Po ńoj se otvoriše taj vrata od raja; compared to the Ti se nebeska kraļica from the Miscellany, in Marulić it is almost literal: nebeska s’ kraļica, but she is also kraļica dvora nebeskog and so on.
The inherited medieval linguistic and versification resources that take part in the formation of Marulić’s verses the first known versions of which appear in the Paris Miscellany that are particularly discussed here are: collocations, phrasemes (nominal, adjectival, adverbial and interjectional), syntactemes (subjective and predicative), collocations of two concepts (amplificatory and antithetical), similes, identical grammatical forms and in content the same or similar contexts, and finally, rhyme. In both the Miscellany and in Marulić there are the same verbal collocations. Of them only the collocation smrt/semrt prijeti/prijati from the Miscellany has a direct echo in Marulić. This means that this was a clichéd literary language formula instead of the verb ‘umrijeti’, die. Other groups of collocation - with the verbs imiti, početi, račiti, stvoriti, učiniti (se) -are entirelyindependent in Marulić as with respect to the Miscellany and are not the onlyones that Marulić uses. Among the phrasemes the most used are the nominal. The arrangement of the component parts in Bog jedini, kraļ nebeski is constant with the high style post-positional attribute. Unlike god the Mother of god is nebeska kraļica with the usual word order in both the Miscellany and in Marulić, who also has prislavna kraļice, prislavna Divice. Other nominal phrases do not have or do not have to have any settled order of the component parts – in the Miscellany, for example, sina Božja, but in Marulić always Božji sin (with the usual word order),or vice versa; in the Miscellany nebeska slava and in Marulić slava nebeska and even dvor nebeski. As for the joint adjectival phrases we note only one: grihom gubav – grihom gubavi, but in both places in a marked place, in the rhyme. Marulić inherits the usual or common syntactical links: subject with the same or similar verbal predicate and vice versa – predicate with the same nouns (less often other kinds of word) as syntactic complements (object, adverbial). Thus in the Miscellany we have Trubļa trubi but in Marulić Trubļa će trubiti; as against krv ističe in Marulić there is karv teče; as against ne more se ... reći in Marulić: izreći ne može;as against nimaš konca – ni konca; as against vsimi oblada in Marulić, almost literally, svim oblada, and grihu speti – grihom, grisi speti; the same is: na Sud priti and so on. The connections of two concepts may be syndetic and asyndetic, for example nebo, zemļu alongside nebo i zemļa in both the Miscellany and in Marulić; otac, mati in the Miscellany but in Marulić ni otac ni mati; žlči, octa in the Miscellany but in Marulić žuč, ocat, but also: žuči i ļuta octa, octa i žuči, octa tere žuči. Adjectival connections are only syndetic: stari i mladi, veli i mali u oba izvora. The rare common similes are in Marulić not literal but very close: the lice veće slnca svitlo is in Marulić lice... sunca veće prosiva, and as against mladinac je slaji meda in Marulić there is usta slaja meda, rič slaju nere med, kripļenje slaje satja i meda.
Of the inherited medieval rhymes from the Paris Miscellany, in Marulic we find only four: tilo / gńilo (once in an outer and once in an inner rhyme), gubav /ļubav – gubavi / ļubavi (with semantic opposition: grihom gubav(i) / Božja ļjubav);probodena / okruńena – okruńena / probodena.
This paper continues the author’s research into Marulić’s roots in the Croatian medieval heritage. The point of departure was the Paris Miscellany, the source of the oldest medieval poems. It is possible to carry out consideration of the inherited medieval motifs and poetical linguistic and stylistic procedures and properties in which they appear in Marulić on a much broader set of medieval comparative material, but the author believes that this would bring only a quantitative expansion and not a qualitative enrichment as compared to the actual procedure used, that is, it would probably not essentially supplement the categories of language resources used, only the diversity of them (for example, new connections, new phrasemes, similes and so on) and the number of examples for the categories already studied.
And at the end, once again citing Judith with her eye on the Paris Miscellany and its composition, the author comes to the conclusion that in the well known Marulić statement from the dedication to Dujam Balistrić »...I have put this history into verses, according to the custom of our makers, and, to boot, according to the laws of those old poets« one can read a new meaning, that is an expansion of the contents of the activity of začinjavci, the makers, from these octosyllabic verses to the creation of more intricate and complicated versification structures, of the kind that can be found in »these old poets«. For the poem Svit se konča from the Miscellany tells that in Croatian poetry as early as the 14th century there were dodecasyllabics, and its (relatively refined) versification structure shows that this poem must have been created within the framework of some already existing practice of writing in twelve syllable verses.
Ključne riječi
Marko Marulić; Paris Miscellany; Croatian medieval poetry; inherited language and versification resources; verb collocations; phrasemes; synatactemes; amplificatory and antithetical collocations; similes; identical grammatical forms; rhymes
Hrčak ID:
67297
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.4.2011.
Posjeta: 4.331 *