Augustin Ujevic has been regarded as one of the greatest poets in the south Slavic area, but is still unknown in Italy, except for a few translations of his works published in Italy or in the Croatian Italian speaking community. One of the favourite themes of his poetry was his native Dalmatia, but he was convinced that Dalmatians owed to Italy and the Italian heritage great part of their humanistic culture.
In 1914 he published the sonnet “Il Commiato” in a collective volume, along with poems written by Ivo Andrić, future Nobel Laureate, and other young Croatian authors, and added to it a humoristic autobiography. The essay discusses the sonnet “Il Commiato”, with its particular three versions and their different orthographies following first the Italian and later the modern Croatian and Serbian rules. The analysis concerns as well the lexical and the metrical choices and finally the “young boat” of the poem, defined as the beginning of a poetic and human experience which will bring the author to a peculiar solitude in his withdrawal from common social life and from literary contemporary life, while being still able to maintain a lively and productive dialogue with interpreters and readers.
