Tomislav Ladan (25 June 1932 – 12 September 2008) was a Croatian essayist, critic, translator and novelist.
Ladan was born in
Ivanjica,
Serbia, and spent his formative years in his native
Bosnia and Herzegovina (
Travnik,
Bugojno), where he graduated from the Philosophical Faculty at
Sarajevo. Since he couldn't get
permanent employment in the then
Serbs-dominated Bosnian cultural life because of his sometimes ostentatious Croatian identity, Ladan worked intermittently as a private tutor, translator and journalist — until the Croatian doyen of belles letters,
Miroslav Krleža, found him a job at the
Yugoslav Lexicographical Institute in
Zagreb. Ladan was the director of the same institute and the editor-in-chief of an eight-language parallel dictionary.
Ladan wrote several books of essays that cover diverse fields such as cursing in
Croatian, voluminous polygraphy playing with etymological meanings of the words that define human culture, from God to globalization (''Riječi'', "Words"), and nuances of medieval spiritual culture (''Parva medievalia'').
Ladan's only
novel
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itsel ...
, ''Bosanski grb'' ("Bosnian coat of arms") (1975) is a postmodernist fiction written as a combination of
Rabelaisian linguistic feast and a treatise on the historical destiny of Croats in central Bosnia.
As a
critic
A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or governmen ...
over more than four decades, Ladan surveyed virtually all works written in
Croatian,
Serbian
Serbian may refer to:
* someone or something related to Serbia, a country in Southeastern Europe
* someone or something related to the Serbs, a South Slavic people
* Serbian language
* Serbian names
See also
*
*
* Old Serbian (disambiguat ...
, and
Bosnian — not infrequently to the consternation of the "objects" of his criticism. Follower of
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National Biogr ...
,
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...
and
Frank Kermode, Ladan didn't pay much attention to the
deconstruction
The term deconstruction refers to approaches to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who defined it as a turn away from Platonism's ideas of "true" forms and essences w ...
ists (
Derrida) or
Foucault Foucault may refer to:
*Foucault (surname)
*Léon Foucault (1819–1868), French physicist. Three notable objects were named after him:
**Foucault (crater), a small lunar impact crater
** 5668 Foucault, an asteroid
**Foucault pendulum
*Michel Fouca ...
, both of whom he found arid and sterile. His best critical essays also evaluate such writers as
William Faulkner and
Robert Musil
Robert Musil (; 6 November 1880 – 15 April 1942) was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, ''The Man Without Qualities'' (german: link=no, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), is generally considered to be one of the most important ...
.
Ladan was also a noted translator from Greek, Latin, English, German, Swedish and Norwegian.
References
U spomen, Tomislav Ladan
External links
Umro Tomislav Ladan
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ladan, Tomislav
Croatian essayists
Croatian male writers
Male essayists
Croatian novelists
Male novelists
Croatian translators
1932 births
2008 deaths
People from Ivanjica
People from Travnik
Deaths from cancer in Croatia
Croats of Serbia
20th-century novelists
20th-century translators
20th-century essayists
20th-century male writers