ANTE
KADIĆ, Croatian Reader with Vocabulary. Berkeley: University of California
Syllabus Series No. 361, 1957. V+212 pp., $2.50.
This
mimeographed syllabus of Croatian prose and poetry prepared by Professor Ante
Kadić, who is teaching in the Slavic Department of the University of
California in Berkeley, represents many years of work and experience with
teaching the Croatian language at a college level. We readily agree with the
author that there was an urgent need for such a reader.
The book
is divided into four parts: The first one contains material taken mostly from
Croatian folk creations. The second part presents excerpts from different
Croatian. writers, beginning with the most recent writers and concluding with
those who wrote around the turn of this century.
The third
part offers a "selection of modern Croatian poetry: Communist poetry of
present-day Yugoslavia and the best poetry of the Croatian emigration".
The fourth part of the reader presents selections illustrating the two main
dialects, the Ča and the Kaj.
At the end
of the reader there is an extensive Croatian-English vocabulary pertaining to
the pages in the Selections. After every work there is an explanation, either
about the work, or about the most unusual idioms. In certain cases, more explanation
was essential, The book also has an Index, unfortunately not an Alphabetical
but a chronological one which seems to be a great handicap of this work:
The
compiler writes in the Preface: "I had a two-fold ambition: to provide my
students with a simple reading textbook and at the same time to give them a
representative anthology of literature." No two people have exactly the
same taste in literature, and it is no doubt the privilege of the editor to
present his own choice, but I, for one, would question that his selections are
"representative".
In the
second part, the prose "between the two wars and during the World War
II" is scarcely represented while the post World War II authors are
disproportionately represented. It is hard, for example, to imagine such an
anthology of prose without a few pages of Mile Budak, Ante Bonifačić
or Alija Nametak. One can hardly go along with Professor Kadić's view that
"it was unwise to go further back (and include, for example, Croatian realists
or romanticists) because Croatian prose of the nineteenth century, generally
speaking, is very difficult for the foreign reader to understand." Quite
to the contrary. Is Miroslav Krleža's prose easier than that of Šenoa? Is Ivo
Vojnović less difficult than Vjenceslav Novak?
The same
criticism applies to the third part, namely the "selection of modern
poetry". Here we are missing names like Dragutin Domjanić, Djuro
Sudeta, Ivo Lendić,. Fran Alfirević, A, B, Šimić, Olinko
Delorko, Vladislav Kušan, Sida Košutić, Lucijan Kordić etc. If the
goal was to present fully the newest Croatian prose and poetry, one wonders why
Professor Kadić was unable to find more material in Hrvatska Revija; which
is still the most representative Croatian literary publication although it appears
in Buenos Aires rather than in Zagreb. Also several books of prose and poetry
have been published by Croatian emigrant writers, some of whom were considered
great writers in the period between the "two wars".
It would
be desirable that this syllabus be sometime published as a printed book. We
indeed agree with the author that this anthology was necessary, and we hope
that some more will be compiled, particularly about the authors and periods not
covered in this anthology. Professor Kadić has started the way.