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🦋 Immigrant Father
The epigraph to Zupcic's collection Dragi Sol* is from Vicente Gerbasi's poem My Father the Immigrant:
¿Qué fuego de tiniebla, qué cÃrculo de trueno,
cayó sobre tu frente cuando viste esta tierra?
What fire of darkness, what circle of thunder,
Fell over your visage when you beheld this land?
(making no claims for the quality of that translation/transliteration; I have not read the rest of the poem yet so I don't have any context) -- Gerbasi, a key figure of Venezuelan poetry in the 20th Century, was a son of Italian immigrants; Zupcic's father is an immigrant from Croatia. Several of the stories in this collection are told from the point of view of a Venezuelan named Vinko Spolovtiva, concerning his (absent) Croatian father.
 * Dragi is Croatian for "Dear", the salutation at the top of a letter. The story "Letters toward writing a novel" consists in part of letters written by Zlatica Didic to his siblings, and his son, narrating, comments, "There is a word which opens most of the letters: Dragi. According to Bozidar, who translated them, this means something like "dearest". I decided not to translate it: it has a sweet sound, a nice sound. Nigmar thinks it looks like a sunstone -- that seems right to me."
posted afternoon of Sunday, September 4th, 2011
➳ More posts about Epigraphs
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➳ More posts about Slavko Zupcic
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