Content area
Full Text
Abstract
In the poetry of Boris Maruna (1940-2007), a Croatian modemist poet who is, together with Viktor Vida, considered the best Croatian emigrant poet, one can see the influences of American popular culture of the 1960s and 1970s. By living on three continents - Europe, South America, and North America - and having gained education in Los Angeles, Maruna incorporated into his poetic code some of the fundamental and typical determinants of American cultural and subcultural lifestyle. Fast food, television, film, rock/pop music, cars, freedom of sexual behavior... are some of the adopted forms of American culture that Maruna in his narrative poems both thematizes and advocates, but also questions in an extremely critical way. Irony, humor and strong satire represent the aesthetic aspects by which Maruna reveals the hypocritical, vain, and existential face of the United States of America of that period. On the other hand, like a distant Arcadia, there are landscapes and symbols of the homeland that he abandoned, and the desire to one day return into its physical spaces. However, even the so desired homeland cannot go without critical invectives and poetically ironic comments. Even then, Maruna's liberal "unadjusted" consciousness makes itself heard, outside all the dictates of expected behavior, thus completely isolating him from the matrix of Croatian emigration poets.
Keywords: modern Croatian poetry, popular culture, irony, Croatian emigrant poetry, sexual liberalism
Boris Maruna, a Croatian modernistic poet and essayist, was born in 1940 in Podprag, a village that does not exist anymore, on the southern slopes of Velebit. On the remnants of his stone birth house, there is now a memorial plate serving as a reminder that a great Croatian poet was born there. Maruna became a great poet in emigration. In 1960, together with his two brothers he escaped to Italy, then to Argentina, England, and the United States of America, followed by many other countries and parts of the world, some of which he simply passed through, as nothing more than an incidental yet fateful guest.1 A nomad of beauty, imprisoned within foreign borders but free in his dreams, Maruna dreamt of a change in the political system of his Croatian homeland, hoping for a fast return into a free and independent country - just like...