Šoljan’s translations and plays: politics in plain verse

Šoljan’s translation – New scholarship on Antun Šoljan argues that his work—whether translating George Orwell’s 1984 or writing verse drama and postmodern poetry—uses literary craft to unsettle authority. Across discussions of neologisms, intertextual irony, and cultural motifs, the

On the Adriatic. Antun Šoljan (1932–1993) has long been treated as one of Croatian literature’s most versatile and widely translated voices of the latter half of the twentieth century. But a cluster of recent scholarly readings returns to a sharper question: what happens when style stops being decoration and becomes a lever—turning politics. culture. and even everyday life against themselves?.

Nova Istra places Šoljan at the center of that debate by looking closely at his translation practice. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published relatively early in Yugoslavia. with translations into Slovenian in 1967. Serbian in 1968. and Croatian in 1984—this last one by Šoljan. What matters now is not just that the book arrived, but how he carried it into local reality.

Leszek Małczak describes Šoljan’s defining approach as creative adaptation—reshaping the translated text “to the present or to a local context.” In the case of Orwell’s novel. Šoljan’s translation adopts a polemical stance toward the earlier Serbian version. He expands and modifies passages, adds explanations, and introduces additional terms absent from both the original and the Serbian translation. The result, Małczak argues, is a translation that clearly exhibits features of a politically subversive translation.

The most studied battlefield is language itself. Attention is given to Šoljan’s treatment of Orwell’s neologisms—especially newspeak and crimethink. The Serbian translator, Vlada Stojiljković, rendered these as novogovor and zlomisao. Šoljan introduced novozbor and zlodum. Those word choices are not presented as mere stylistic flair. They carry culturally specific connotations and references to the Yugoslav political context. The reading points particularly to associations with what was colloquially known as ‘verbal offence’ (verbalni delikt) in criminal law. alongside ironic references to state institutions—signs. in Małczak’s framing. of a critical engagement with the political realities of socialist Yugoslavia.

The argument lands in a wider cultural tension. Yugoslavia, the scholarship notes, was relatively open to publishing dissident literature compared to other communist countries. Even so, internal criticism remained restricted. Within that constraint. Šoljan’s translation becomes less like a neutral literary act and more like a site where subversion can slip through—without needing to announce itself loudly.

The same logic of formal mischief appears in a different key in Helena Peričić’s examination of intertextuality in Šoljan’s play Romance of Three Loves (Romanca o tri ljubavi. 1976). Peričić emphasizes that the play’s plot and structure are relatively simple, yet it stands out through stylistic complexity. It is written entirely in verse. making it an exception both within Šoljan’s dramatic oeuvre and within Croatian drama of the 1970s.

Love, too, is treated as something strange and total. Romance of Three Loves foregrounds love as a totalizing experience, marking a departure from the existential concerns of his earlier works and from the dominant socio-political focus of the period.

Peričić describes Šoljan’s writing as shaped by a complex. Socratic irony. realized through intertextual strategies that subvert literary authority. Several modes of intertextuality are identified in the play: structural and thematic borrowing from canonical works. historical or metonymic references. mythological and religious allusions. citation and paraphrase. Within this framework, two principal instruments for producing irony are foregrounded: genre and verse.

The most evident intertextual effect is also the most paradoxical. Peričić points to Šoljan’s own oxymoronic classification of the play as a ‘sentimental farce’. That label is reflected in farcical elements—juxtapositions of elevated language with trivial, even bawdy language, and character types. Verse then becomes its own reference point, functioning as an intertextual gesture back to earlier literary traditions. In this reading, irony destabilizes formal and generic authority while paradoxically reaffirming their centrality.

If translations and drama show politics hiding in language and genre. Sibila Petlevski follows Šoljan into poetry with a postmodern framework—one defined by intertextuality. genre hybridity. and a sustained negotiation between authorial voice and cultural context. Šoljan’s poem Gazelle (Gazela, 1971) is treated as a paradoxical construct: hermetic and accessible at once.

Petlevski links the poem to the ghazal. the amatory poem or ode originating in Arabic poetic tradition. and describes Gazelle as reworking that form into something self-reflexive. The articulation of longing. she writes. can be read as cultural positioning. oriented toward ‘Mediterranean humanism’ in contrast to the socio-political context of 1970s Yugoslavia.

Here. the gazelle motif becomes a metaphor for the author’s personal and generational ‘spiritual ecology’—an ideal that remains fundamentally unattainable. It appears as an elusive, ‘mirage-like’ ideal. Petlevski expands the discussion to Šoljan’s wider poetics, emphasizing modernity and the structural role of dialogue. His work repeatedly stages an interaction between the individual and external frameworks—geographical, historical, and cultural. This dialogic principle extends across genres, shaping both his poetry and drama.

Šoljan’s modernity is described as established beyond the schematic adoption of modern poetic forms and outside any ideological stance that would negate predecessors so completely as to exclude them altogether. In other words: modernity emerges through a self-conscious engagement with tradition.

Boris Senker shifts the lens again. reading Antun Šoljan’s The Other People on the Moon (Drugi ljudi na mjesecu. 1978) as a novel that can be placed within several literary traditions. The novel can be read as an inscription within. and a relativisation of ‘jeans prose’. a canonically associated style with J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and, in the local context, Šoljan’s own A Brief Excursion (Kratki izlet, 1965).

Jeans—torn and worn—are treated as a metaphor for the protagonists’ ‘shattered illusions’. Structurally circular, the novel follows the protagonists’ attempt to ‘escape the constraints of everyday life’, only for the effort to culminate in failure and return them to ‘their point of departure’.

Senker also places Šoljan’s text beside beat literature, most notably Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). At the same time, the novel draws on a long tradition of maritime writing, from the Odyssey onward. Two friends sail the Adriatic in search of sunken treasure. The treasure is symbolically understood as ‘lost and forgotten values’. The plot unfolds against the backdrop of the Moon landing. foregrounding a tension between technological achievement and the characters’ existential emptiness.

Senker calls it, specifically, a ‘novel of navigation’. By attending to the novel’s episodic structure and vivid imagery, he emphasizes its filmic potential. He also points out problems articulated within the fictional world and in a broader social context—particularly the representation of contemporary Adriatic tourism. including its ‘commercialization and dehumanization’ of the coast. Gradual environmental degradation is also identified as part of what the novel articulates.

Read together, these discussions create an unsettling through-line. Neologisms are reshaped rather than simply translated. Verse drama turns irony into a demolition of generic certainty. A Mediterranean humanism is constructed in deliberate contrast to 1970s Yugoslavia’s socio-political atmosphere. Even a moon-landing backdrop and Adriatic voyages become a way to stage existential emptiness, commercialization, and environmental decline.

The result is not one tidy conclusion about Šoljan’s politics. It’s something harder to dismiss: across genres. his most recognizable craft—translation. irony. intertextual structure. poetic forms—keeps finding ways to press against the limits of what the culture around him wanted to stabilize. And in a setting where dissident publication could exist while internal criticism remained restricted. that pressure feels less like theory and more like practice: resistance built into the choice of words. the shape of a scene. and the stories a coastline tells itself.

Antun Šoljan Nova Istra George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four newspeak crimethink translation practice politically subversive translation Romance of Three Loves intertextuality irony Gazelle Mediterranean humanism ghazal The Other People on the Moon jeans prose Kerouac On the Road maritime literature Adriatic tourism environmental degradation