KAKO RUBOVI GOVORE O SREDIŠTU (DRUGA VENECIJA PREDRAGA MATVEJEVIĆA)
HOW THE EDGES SPEAK ABOUT THE CENTRE (ANOTHER VENICE BY PREDRAG MATVEJEVIĆ)

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, Another Venice by Predrag Matvejević is analysed as a travel, poetic and essayistic prose. he author built his own image of Venice starting from marginal motifs such as its wooden pillars, plants, wall reliefs, peripheral islets and natural phenomena to the well-known centre – the former Venetian Republic and its history, culture and art. Marginal motifs indicate the instability of spatial identity: winds and human hands brought plants from diferent parts of the world, and wooden pillars, coniscated by the Venetian conquest of the Croatian coast, testify to the transience of the city’s foundations, which should be replaced over and over again. he illustrations of the city maps and views present the works of anonymous authors from the past, who also contributed to the identity of the city, making its (imaginative) cartography. Making marginal motifs literary and incorporating cartographic illustrations by anonymous authors, Matvejević points to a neglected side of canonised history. Since the motifs are presented in a poetic rhythm, the paper also analyses the style of Matvejević’s work, whose dynamics is built by contrasts, syntactic parallelisms, airmative associations to writers from the past and, in the end, by fragments that place Venice among the Mediterranean cities, thus underlining its debt both to Western and Eastern cultural inluences.

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