Colloquia Maruliana, Vol. 5 , 1996.
Original scientific paper
Marulić's Trilinguality
Mirko Tomasović
Abstract
Marko Marulić, like all humanists, wrote in Latin and, like all the authors of the Renaissance era, in his mother tongue, the Croatian vernacular. Also, he has left a couple of texts in Italian, because with Italy he was connected in several ways and because, in his day, this country was the cultural model for all Europe. We may say that with him multilinguality proved fruitful: He joined the European literary production and demedievalized the Croatian poetry, which he endowed with new standards, within the framework of the general Renaissance metamorphosis.
In Latin Marulić composed the christian-vergilian epic Dauidias, in 14 cantos and 6756 hexameters; in Croatian he wrote the epic Judita (Judith), poetically conge-nial to the Latin Dauidias and rendered in six cantos and 2126 quadruply rhymed dodecasyllables; in Italian, however, he was capable of expressing himself poetically in a sonnet form. Even his translations bear witness to the rare linguistic ability with which he composed, in three different languages, works of recognizable poetic pro-file and unquestionable aesthetic value. He translated from Italian into Latin and Croatian. He recast into Latin the First Canto of Dante’s Commedia divina and Petrarch’s canzone Vergine bella, translated two Petrarch’s sonnets into Croatian dodecasyllables and rendered in Croatian the De Imititione Christi by Thomas a Kempis. Also, he recast his own works from one into another language, as is testified by the Carmen de doctrina Domini nostri Iesu Christi pendentis in cruce, which he probably first wrote in Croatian and then transposed into Latin language and versification.
Sometimes he would use macaronic effects. So, for example, intensifying the mes-sage of his anthological Croatian poem the Molitva suprotiva Turkom (The Prayer against the Turks) is the Latin acrostic: Solus Deus potest nos liberare de tribulatione inimicorum nostrorum Turcorum sua potentia infinita. Another example of macaronic method may be found in the poem Slavić (The Nightingale), modelled upon St. Bonaventura’s Philomena. Intertwined with the Croatian text are Latin words, placed in the position of rime and rhyming in ingenuous ways either between themselves or with Croatian words. Towards the end of the same poem he inserted two Latin verses, with his artistic “signature”: “Marchus ego sum Marullus,/ Quo peccator maior nullus”.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
9714
URI
Publication date:
22.4.1996.
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