Summary

Anton Podbevšek: Collected Poems / Zbrane pesmi

Kazalo

• prejšnje poglavje
• na glavno kazalo

Together with Srečko Kosovel, Anton Podbevšek (1898–1981) is the key figure of the avant-garde movement in Slovenian literature. The edition of his collected poems Zbrane pesmi presents the first attempt of a digital critical edition of any poet's opus in Slovenian literature. It includes all published Podbevšek's poems and their variants as well as all accessible unpublished pieces of poetry; exhaustive notes and commentaries^↑ are included as well.

Podbevšek wrote most of his known poems in the years 1915–1920 and published them in magazines in the years 1919–1922. In 1925 he published his sole collection of poems Človek z bombami (The Man With Bombs) by himself, after he was rejected by numerous publishers. Thereupon he retreated from public life as a poet, but he still resorted to writing later in life and wrote some new poems after the World War II. He was also working on a renewed edition of the ill-famed collection Človek z bombami. All postwar material remained in manuscripts with the exception of three poems which were broadcast on Slovenian national radio in 1958.

The first part of the edition includes:

• poems from his youthful period, published in magazines^↑
• transcript of the collection Človek z bombami (as published in 1925),^↑
• author's copy of Človek z bombami, to which the poet himself made corrections by hand, evidently some decades after the first edition: critical (interpretative) transcript^↑ and facsimile^↑
• transcript of poems broadcast on the radio.^↑

The second part of the edition includes unpublished material from Podbevšek's legacy and other sources:

• an intriguing experimental cycle of poems Žolta pisma (The Yellow Letters) and other manuscripts from his youthful period,^↑
• manuscripts^↑ and
• typescripts of uncertain date,^↑ which are partly from the poet's youthful phase, and some most likely belonging to the later period.

The distinctive feature of the digital edition from the technical point of view are the parallel presentations of facsimiles and their transcripts, especially in the collection Človek z bombami. ^↑ Here, the parallel view makes it possible to compare the lyrics of the first edition with later corrections made to the poems, and compare both to the facsimile. Podbevšek introduced new standards also to the visual aspect of poetry; the digital edition makes it possible to observe different forms of numerous poems. Last but not least, another distinctive feature of the e-edition is an alphabetically ordered index^↑ of Podbevšek's poems, which points to all existing variants of individual poems by use of hyper-references. In this way, quick and surveyable access as well as cross references to variants are provided.