Original scientific paper

One Arrow, Four Wings. Carmina Figurata in Croatian Vernacular and Latin Poetry of the 16th Century

Gorana Stepanić orcid.org/0000-0001-9642-1181 ; Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile u Puli

Abstract

In the Croatian poetry of the 16th century, the carmen figuratum is a rare phenomenon. But such compositions, in which the linguistic material (letters, syllables, words, lines) is organised in such a way as to form a recognisable shape or pattern, are much more frequent in the 17th and 18th centuries. Familiar to us in poetry in Croatian are the chalice from the publication Osmanšćica (1631) by Šibenik’s Ivan Tomko Mrnavić (1579-1637) and the cross from the Saltijer slovinski (Slavic Psalter, 1729) by Ignjat Đurđević from Dubrovnik (1675-1737). In Latin there are numbers of technopaegnia in the wider sense of the word, that is, poems in which the linguistic material is manipulated in order to produce a text graphically and semantically particularly highlighted or simply to make the text auditively, visually or intellectually attractive (anagrams, chronograms, riddles, pangrammatic verses). In the 16th century anagrams or combinatory poems appeared, and two were composed by Marko Marulić: an epigram about a good and bad lawyer (Causidicus uersibus rectis bonus, retrogradis malus) and a Stoic-Epicurean epigram (Versus in directum stoici, in transuersum epicurei). In the th and 18th centuries Ladislav Simandi (1655-1715) and Pavao Ritter Vitezović (1652-1713) wrote many such compositions.
The oldest pattern poems in Western literature are the axe, egg and wings of Simmias of Rhodes (late 4th and early 3rd century BC), the panpipe (Pseudo-Theocritus, late 3rd or 2nd century), the Doric altar (Dosiadas, 1st or early 2nd century) and the Ionian altar (Lucius Julius Vestinus, about 132), all to be found in the Greek Anthology. This Hellenistic collection was a model to humanist poets and authors of treatises about poetry who wrote about pattern poems or who wrote them themselves, such as Giulio Cesare Scaligero (1484-1558) in his Poetics (1561), George Puttenham (1529-1590) in his English language handbook of poetry The Arte of English Poesie (1587), Lancino Corti (Curti, Corte or Curtius, 1460-1520) in the collection Lancini Curtii epigrammaton libri decem (Milano, 1521) or François Rabelais (1483-1553) in the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel.
The 16th century repertoire of visual poems in Croatian literature consists of two short lyric poems in Croatian by the Ragusan poet Dinko Ranjina (1536-1607) and several Latin epigrams by D idacus Pyrrhus (1517-1599), Portuguese humanist who spent a good deal of his life in Dubrovnik. It has been speculated (d. Higgins) that a visual poem in the shape of a Y was composed by the humanist Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), yet this is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence.
The visual poem of Dinko Ranjina in the form of an arrow was printed as no. 361 in a collection Pjesni razlike [divers poems] (Florence, 1563, fol. 116-116v). Later editions of the poem (Ljudevit Gaj, 1850; Matija Valjavac, 1891) reproduce the graphic appearance of the printed original, in which the verses are arranged in such a way as to create an arrowhead pointing to the right. In the poem the forlorn male lyric subject addresses the god Eros complaining that he has pierced him with his arrow, because of which he was forced to serve him. The poem is constructed of the traditional verses of the Croatian Renaissance poetry arranged into an augmented and then diminished series (2+4+5+8+10+12 syllables and inversely).
The next poem from the Ranjina collection, no. 362 (Podnošu zlu boles, nevolju i tugu / I bear sore ill, trouble and grief) gives a picture of (Cupid’s) wings. The repertoire of the versification of this poem is the same as in Arrow, but the verses are arranged in such a way that the number of syllables first of all falls, from the longest, dodecasyllabic, to the shortest, disyllabic, verse, after which comes the augmentation. Unlike Arrow, Ranjina’s Wings has previously attracted little attention. Ivan Kasumović has speculated that the poem no. 363 of the same collection also provides an image of wings, but here this proposition is rejected since in its three stanzas there is no use of verses with a rising or falling number of syllables, as there is in the previous poems.
Far better known than Ranjina’s pattern poems in Croatian are three Latin technopaegnia in the form of wings by Didacus Pyrrhus (1517-1599), who lived from 1558 until his death in Dubrovnik. They were published in the collection Hieronymi Phalethi Savonensis poematum libri septem (Ferrara, 1564, fol. 134r¬134v) and reprinted by Petar Kolendić (»Nekoliko pesama humaniste Didaka Pira«, Zbornik istorije književnosti Odeljenja literature i jezika SANU, 2, Belgrade, 1961). All three poems have love as their subject in the tradition of the Roman love elegy and in all of them Cupid’s wings are mentioned. A certain deviation from the traditional rhetoric of unrequited love is found in the third poem, in which an ageing Corinthian courtesan complains to Cupid of the conduct of her younger colleague. The three sets of wings of Didacus have different lengths (the first two have ten and the third fourteen lines each), and all the verses are taken from the traditional repertoire of Roman elegiac and lyrical poetry (Horace).
Croatian philology has previously discussed the possible sources of Ranjina’s Arrow: the poets of the Greek Anthology have been mentioned by Kasumović and the Italian Petrarchans by Mihovil Kombol. The relationship of the verses of Arrow and the traditional repertoire of Croatian Renaissance poetry has been investigated by Pavao Pavličić. This article proposes that Ranjina’s source might for his two pattern poems have been some contemporary Neo-Latin composition, and that the shape of the arrow was invented by the poet himself; it is also proposed that the idea for his wing-shaped poem might have been given him by the Latin wings of his fellow-citizen and friend Didacus Pyrrhus.

Keywords

Dinko Ranjina; Didak Pir (Didacus Pyrrhus Lusitanus, Jacobus Flavius Eborensis); technopaegnion; pattern poetry; carmen figuratum; Croatian Neo-Latin literature; Dubrovnik 16th century lyric

Hrčak ID:

138463

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/138463

Publication date:

30.4.2015.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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