Original scientific paper
“ONE MAN’S SEA IS ANOTHER MAN’S WATER”: THE MOTIF OF WATER IN THE ORAL POETRY OF HVAR
Ana Perinić Lewis
orcid.org/0000-0002-2425-1061
; Institut za antropologiju, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The island of Hvar is a meeting point of the Dinaridic and the Mediterranean area, a blend of the inland and the coastal Dalmatia on a small scale, where a symbiosis of two oral literary traditions can be found in an insular area of only 300 square kilometers. The settlements on the eastern part of the island are dominated by epic, heroic, decasyllabic poems, while predominantly lyric non-decasyllabic forms are found on the western part of the island. In the analysis of the manuscript collections of oral poetry collected on the island in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the inscription of the geographic space on the thematic level has been explored, in particular the way in which the topoi of the sea and water are represented. The notions of the sea, the sea as a topos, a metaphor or a well-established formula, are much more frequent in the western than in the eastern part of the island. The topos of water is far more frequent in the poetry of the eastern part of the island of Hvar than in the poetry of their western co-islanders. Despite mutual influences, borrowing and localization of certain contents, the sea and the experience of the sea are the strongest evidence for the Mediterranean belonging of the population who lives near the sea and of the sea.
Keywords
Island of Hvar; oral poetry; sea topos; water topos; mythic water; Mediterranean
Hrčak ID:
61987
URI
Publication date:
8.12.2010.
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