The Early Poetical Works of Vladimir Kaučič – Jean Vodaine

Abstract

This article presents the early poetic opus of Franco-Slovenian author Vladimir Kaucic – Jean Vodaine. The period in question is from 1945 when he published his first book of poetry to 1955, when he started to work for Editions Caractères in Paris. This work enabled him to meet many famous contemporary artists (such as Tzara and Jakovski), and his views on art would evolve after this period.

Vodaine was born in 1921 near the town of Tolmin. In his childhood his family moved to Lorraine, France, where he acquired primary education and started to make a living as labourer. Meanwhile, he was collaborating with local worker’s cultural associations and started to write poetry, paint, and create graphics and typographies. The article presents the analysis of his first books of poetry and poems that were published in literary magazines of that time.

The analysis shows that Vodaine’s preferred themes of writing in that period were nature, love, Lorraine, the problems of the working class, and of living in the modern world. The quality of Vodaine’s early poetry is found in his linguistic eloquence and inventive thematic combinations, such as workplace motifs and nature, which are often expressed with some irony. Although Vodaine’s lexicon is beautiful, his early poetry is fairly repetitive and schematic, and we may notice the influence of Prévert and Verlaine. The last book of poetry analysed in this paper represents a turn in the artist’s literary creation as he, for the first time, manifests his original poetic expression, which will evolve in the poetry of his mature artistic period.