Literary Excerpt: Tin Ujević

Tin Ujević (1891–1955) is, for many readers, the central lyric voice of twentieth-century Croatian poetry, and Svakidašnja jadikovka ("Everyday Lament," written in Paris in 1916 and collected in his debut volume Lelek sebra, 1920) is his most recited poem. Its power is built from grammar that conversation rarely uses at this intensity: a heaped series of vocatives addressed to no one and everyone, the systematic dropping of the verb to be, word order bent for emphasis and metre, and a rhyme scheme that leans on the long-rising accent of Croatian. Ujević entered the public domain in 2026 (70 years after the author's 1955 death), so the lines below are quoted genuinely, with attribution. This page reads a short opening passage and then unpacks each grammatical engine.

The text

From the opening of Tin Ujević, Svakidašnja jadikovka (written 1916; collected in Lelek sebra, 1920). Given in standard orthography (the accent marks appear only later, in the section on metre).

The vocative: addressing the absent

The emotional spine of Ujević's lament is direct address, and Croatian marks direct address with a dedicated case, the vocative. When the poet cries Bože, Bože he is using the vocative of Bog ("God"): the nominative Bog shifts to Bože, with the final consonant softened and the ending -e added — the classic masculine vocative pattern (compare prijatelj → prijatelju, brat → brate). The vocative does not refer to God as a subject or an object; it reaches out and calls him. That is its whole grammatical job: it stands outside the clause, marked off by commas, summoning an addressee.

What makes the device poetic is that the addressee cannot answer. The lyric "I" calls on God, on the night, on his own soul — apostrophe, the rhetorical address to the absent or the abstract — and the vocative is the case that powers it. Throughout the poem the vocative recurs like a refrain of helpless calling.

Poetic ellipsis: the missing "is"

Read the last line of the passage again: izgubljen, kao da me nema ("lost, as though I do not exist"). Where is the verb governing izgubljen ("lost")? There is none — and there does not need to be. Croatian, like the rest of the Slavic family, freely omits the present tense of biti ("to be") in nominal predication when context makes it recoverable. Full prose might write ja sam izgubljen ("I am lost"); the poem strips out sam and leaves the bare participle, which lands harder for being unsupported. This is poetic ellipsis: the deliberate omission of a recoverable element to gain compression and force.

The same ellipsis can drop the copula in equational sentences — Život san for Život je san ("Life [is] a dream") — a move at home in proverbs, headlines, and verse. In Ujević the dropped sam / je leaves the adjectives and participles exposed, so that the speaker's states (slab, sam, izgubljen) confront the reader without grammatical cushioning.

Marked word order: bending the line

Croatian word order is grammatically free because the case endings, not the positions, carry the syntactic roles (see basic word order and its freedom). A poet exploits that freedom relentlessly. Two marked orderings stand out in the passage.

First, postposed adjectives: in obećanja blistavih ("glittering promises") the adjective blistavih follows its noun, rather than the neutral blistavih obećanja. Putting the adjective after the noun is a high, lyrical order in Croatian — it foregrounds the adjective and gives the phrase a formal, slightly archaic ring, and it lets the long word blistavih fall on the line's strong final position.

Second, fronting and parallelism: the opening triple Kako je teško biti slab, / kako je teško biti sam front-loads the exclamatory kako je teško ("how hard it is") and repeats it, so that the structure itself becomes the lament — each line a fresh blow. The final twist i biti star, a biti mlad breaks the parallel with the contrastive a ("yet"), pivoting from accumulation to paradox: the cruelty of being both old and young at once.

Pitch accent in the rhyme

Standard Croatian distinguishes four pitch accents, and rhyme in formal verse is not merely about matching letters — it is about matching the stressed syllable's pitch and length. The rhyming monosyllables slab / sam / mlad all carry the long-falling accent (the dugosilazni), marked with the inverted-circumflex shape slȃb / sȃm / mlȃd. This is not an accident of these three words: a rule of standard Croatian forbids rising accents on monosyllables, so a one-syllable rhyme word can only be short-falling or long-falling. Because all three share the same accent — long-falling — the rhyme lands as a true rhyme to the ear, not merely on paper. For the learner the practical point is this: the rhyme feels "full" because the accented vowels share both length and pitch contour, not just spelling. A pair that matched only on letters but clashed in length or pitch would sound, to a native ear, like a near-miss.

The accent marks below are shown only to make the prosody visible; you would never write them in ordinary text. The four-way system uses: short-falling ȁ, short-rising à, long-falling ȃ, long-rising á.

Vocabulary gloss

One ambiguity is worth flagging for learners. Sam in this poem is the adjective sȃm ("alone"), not the enclitic sam ("[I] am"). They are spelled identically; only the accent and the syntax tell them apart. Here biti sam is "to be alone," and Ja sam … sam would be "I am … alone" — the first sam the auxiliary, the second the adjective. Context disambiguates, but the coincidence is a genuine trap.

How the grammar serves the passage

Ujević's lament is grammatically lean and emotionally heavy, and the two qualities are connected. The vocative lets the speaker call out to a God and a world that will not answer, turning the poem into one long apostrophe. Ellipsis of the copula strips the lines down to raw states — slab, sam, izgubljen — with no verb to soften them. Marked word order (postposed blistavih, fronted kako je teško, the pivoting a) keeps the diction high and lets the heaviest words fall on the strong metrical positions. And the pitch-accented rhyme binds slab / sam / mlad with a music that exists only in the sounded language. A reader who can recognise the vocative, supply the missing je / sam, and feel why the adjective sits after its noun is reading not just the sense of the poem but its grief.

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