Republic of Ragusa - Ragusan Literature

Ragusan Literature

The Ragusan literature in which Latin, Italian and Croatian languages coexisted blossomed in the 15th and 16th century.

According to Graubard:

During the Renaissance era, Venetian-ruled Dalmatia and Ragusa gave birth to influential intellectuals – mostly minor aristocrats and clergymen, Jesuits especially – who kept alive the memory of Croatia and the Croatian language when they composed or translated plays and books from Italian and Latin into the vernacular. No matter that the dialects of Dalmatia and Dubrovnik were different from each other ... and both these dialects were somewhat different from the dialect of Zagreb, capital of the Habsburg-ruled north. They still thought of it as Croatian. ... The Dubrovnik poet Dominko Zlatarić (1555–1610) explained on the frontispiece of his 1597 translation of Sophocles' tragedy Elektra and Tasso's Aminta that it had been "iz veće tudieh jezika u Hrvacki izlozene," "translated from more foreign languages in Croatian.

Croatian language was normally used among lower classes, Italian in the upper. Ragusans were in general bilingual: speaking Croatian in common day to day duties and Italian in official occasions or mixing both. Literary works of famous Ragusans were written in both Croatian and Italian language.

Among them are the works of writers Džore Držić, Marin Držić, Ivan Bunić Vučić, Ignjat Đurđević, Ivan Gundulić, Šišmundo (Šiško) Menčetić, Dinko Ranjina; and following writers, beside others from the 16th to the 19th century (before the Age of Romantic National Awakenings) were explicit in declaring themselves as Croats and their language as Croatian: Vladislav Menčetić, Dominko (Dinko) Zlatarić (see above), Bernardin Pavlović, Mavro Vetranović, Nikola Nalješković, Junije Palmotić, Jakov Mikalja, Joakim Stulli, Marko Bruerović, Peter Ignaz Sorgo, Antun Sorkočević (1749–1826), Giovanni Francesco Sorgo (1706–71).

The Croatian-language works from republic of Dubrovnik had a large role in the developing of Croatian literature, as well as modern Croatian language.