Gundulich, Ivan
GUNDULICH, IVAN (1588-1638), known also as Giovanni Gondola, Servian poet, was born at Ragusa on the 8th of January 1588. His father, Franco Gundulich, once the Ragusan envoy to Constantinople and councillor of the republic, gave him an excellent education. He studied the " humanities " with the Jesuit, Father Muzzi, and philosophy with Father Ricasoli. After that he studied Roman law and jurisprudence in general. He was member of the Lower Council and once served as the 1 Air-dried guncotton will contain 2 % or less of moisture.
chief magistrate of the republic. He died on the 8th of December 1638. A born poet, he admired much the Italian poets of his time, from whom he made many translations into Servian. It is believed that he so translated Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. He is known to have written eighteen works, of which eleven were dramas, but of these only three have been fully preserved, others having perished during the great earthquake and fire in 1667. Most of those dramas were translations from the Italian, and were played, seemingly with great success, by the amateurs furnished by the noble families of Ragusa. But his greatest and justly celebrated work is an epic, entitled Osman, in twenty cantos. It is the first political epic on the Eastern Question, glorifying the victory of the Poles over Turks and Tatars in the campaign of 1621, and encouraging a league of the Christian nations, under the guidance of Vladislaus, the king of Poland, for the purpose of driving away the Turks from Europe. The fourteenth and fifteenth cantos are lost. It is generally believed that the Ragusan government suppressed them from consideration for the Sultan, the protector of the republic,,: those two cantos having been violently anti-Turkish.
Osman was printed for the first time in Ragusa in 1826, the two missing cantos being replaced by songs written by Pietro Sorgo (or Sorkochevich). From this edition the learned Italian, Francesco Appendini, made an Italian translation published in 1827. Since that time several other editions have been made. The best are considered to be the edition of the South Slavonic Academy in Agram (1877) and the edition published in Semlin (1889) by Professor Yovan Boshkovich. In the edition of 1844 (Agram) the last cantos, fourteen and fifteen, were replaced by very fine compositions of the Serbo-Croatian poet, Mazhuranich (Mazuranic). The complete works of Gundulich have been published in Agram, 1847, by V. Babukich and by the South Slavonic Academy of Agram in 1889.
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Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
