Background
Oton Župančič was born on January 23, 1878, in Bela Krajina (Vinica), Slovenia. He was the son of Franc Zupancic, a trader, and Ana Malic.
Župančič in the 1930s
Oton Župančič was born on January 23, 1878, in Bela Krajina (Vinica), Slovenia. He was the son of Franc Zupancic, a trader, and Ana Malic.
Zupancic started his education in 1883 at a school in Dragatus. Three years later, he moved to Novo Mesto in southern Camiola and continued his studies for another two years. Three years later, the family then moved to Ljubljana, where he went to high school, learning the four Slovene dialects that would figure into his work. He completed his schooling in 1896, and then moved to Vienna to further his studies in history and geography.
After graduating from the university without a diploma in 1902, he traveled throughout Europe, visiting Austria, France, and Germany.
Oton Župančič's first children’s poems, “Vrtec” and “Angelcek” were published in the Catholic journal Dom in Svet. Other poems from this early period were published in Zadruga (“Cooperative”) and Ljuhljanski zvon (“Ljubljana Bell”), the chief literary journal at the time. During this time, he became associated with the writers Cankar, Kette, and Murn, and his time in Vienna exposed him to the literary trends of the era, including modernism, decadence, and naturalism. In 1899, he published his first collection of poems, entitled Casa opojnosti, which brings together sixty-nine short poems, mostly centering on the theme of love, that demonstrate Zupancic’s debt to modernist poetry.
From 1901 to 1903, Zupancic served in the infantry in Gradée, during which time he began a satiric epic poem entitled “Jerala,” a work that explores the life of poets as well as the socioeconomic struggles in Bela Krajina. Though he continued working on it through the 1920s, it was left unfinished. After leaving the service, he took on a position as a private teacher of Slovene language. Zupancic’s next collection, Cez plan, written between 1899 and 1903 and published in 1904, continues his exploration of the erotic, and some poems memorialize his friend Mum, who died in 1899.
While in Paris, he read the works of Henri Bergson, Emile Verhaeren, and Walt Whitman. During this time, he continued publishing in Ljuhljanski zvon and Slovan. In 1907, he took on a position as a tutor in Duke Waldburg’s home in Württemberg. He also found work as a translator, editor, and archival researcher. He worked extensively translating most of Shakespeare’s major plays into Slovene and other masterworks by English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish writers.
In 1908, he published his most famous collection, Samogovori, a group of five poem cycles that revolve around the oppositions between the ideal and real, body and soul, and reason and intuition. The following year, he left Slovenia again, traveling to Vienna and again taught at Württemberg. He returned to Ljubljana in 1910, and in the next year, he worked for the Ljubljana Drama Society as a dramturge. In 1912, Zupancic became the director of the National Theater. In 1917, he became the editor of Ljubljana zvon. Zupancic’s creative production lessened with his in-creasing involvement with his family as well as Slovenia’s progress towards a national identity within the newly formed Yugoslavia. In the 1930s, he emerged onto the literary scene again, when he published an article about the American writer Louis Adamic, who emigrated from Slovenia as a teenager.
His later works include the historical tragedy Veronika Desniska (1924, “Veronika of Desenice”), the four-volume work edited by Josip Vidmar titled Delà Otona Zupancica, and his last collection of poetry, Zimzelen pod snegom (1945, “Evergreen under the Snow”). His volumes of poetry for children include Pisanice (1900, “Easter Eggs”), Lahkih nog naokrog (1913, “Leaping Lightly”), Ciciban in se kaj (1915, “Ciciban and Other Things”), and Sto ugank (1915, “One Hundred Riddles”).
Oton Župančič's writing is strongly influenced by his native land, and it features folk motifs from the area as well as regional idioms. Though some of his writing deals with the independence of Slovenia, his guiding theme, the sanctity of individual expression, perhaps resonated more deeply in his countrymen’s imagination than his fellow writers’ overtly partisan ideas.
His poems convey the ecstasy of love and pain at its loss; rapturous enjoyment of beauty, especially in the lyrical self; and an exaltation of the individual and dissatisfaction with the world around him. Also, his books display variations of poetic orchestration attesting to the young Slovene modernists’ creed of individual freedom. Also, many of his early poems display an interest in the erotic bordering occasionally on the decadent, as well as investigate melancholic love and philosophical concepts, often utilizing religious imagery.
Zupancic supported the Yugoslav resistance movement during World War II and after the war, he offered his cultural and literary services to the new regime.
While attending high school, Zupancic became a member of a secret young Catholic club with liberal tendencies.
Quotes from others about the person
"Zupancic’s work is rich in different tones. But at base it is remarkably consistent: occasionally pensive, but more often optimistic and life-affirming, structurally flexible, unwaveringly attentive to patterns of sound and rhythm, and uncompromisingly involved with the exploration of Slovenia’s destiny as perceived by the devoted native son.”
On September 22, 1913, Župančič married Ani Kessler. He had three children: Marko, Andrej and Jasna.