From Albion's shore: Lord Byron' poetry in Slovene translations until 1945

Abstract

The publication in 1830 of the early poems of the doyen of Slovene poetry - Dr France Prešeren  in Kranjska čbelica (The Carniola Bee) - marks the beginning of Slovene Romanticism, which ends in 1848, -with the last of his poems published in the fifth volume of the same literary magazine. The period from 1830 to the »revolutionary« year of 1848 is thus committed to Romanticism as the leading movement of Slovene literature, artfully embodied in Prešeren's fine lyrical poetry that aimed at and considerably contributed to national unification and identification, as well as in the Europe-oriented literary criticism of Matija čop.  Comparing the trends of the English and Slovene Romantic Revival, we can readily establish that the emergence of Romantic tenets expressed in poetry was somewhat late on Slovene ground. In England, of course, the crucial years are1789, when Lyrical Ballads were published by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the year 1832, which marks the death of Sir Walter Scott.