RELATIONS

The Journal of Croatian Literature

Ever since its launch by the Croatian Writers Society in 2003, Relations has stayed on its mission of presenting and promoting Croatian literature abroad. All literary genres, poetry and prose, drama and essays by the most prominent Croatian authors, published in translation into English, German, Spanish and French, show who we are – what is our literature and where it stands in the European and world context. From the canonical writers (Brlić Mažuranić, Parun, Krleža, Simić, Kamov, Slamnig…), the writers who marked the past thirty years of the Croatian literary scene (Ugrešić, Drakulić, Benić, Jagić, Maruna, Ferić…), to the ones who are building and changing it as we speak (Dejanović, Vidaić, Herceg, Čolakhodžić…), Relations has offered foreign audiences and professionals an insight into intriguing literary and critical practices but also influential literary magazines and festivals – the phenomena that marked the literature and culture we belong to.

Even if some languages do travel further than others, there are no such things as small languages and small literatures. It is our task to prove this, and we chose to do so by bonding through the pleasure of reading, by giving the reader nothing but a living literary text and a translation that makes it alive in a new world/language. Relations wants to offer this pleasure, and, judging by the results, it is successful in it. Special issues of our journal – anthologies and reviews of contemporary Croatian poetry and prose – serve as reference points for foreign publishers and experts, while some, such as the anthology of the Croatian short story in Spanish, were published abroad as independent books, thereby helping our authors to participate in literary events, book fairs and festivals across the world. What we believe in: the writers and literature Relations brings have something to say about the world and time which we live in, they have their audience and can be heard far and wide. And this is what we want to make possible.