SERBIAN FOLK POETRY IN THE TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION OF JUAN OCTAVIO PRENZ

Abstract

The Argentine writer, poet, translator, and professor Juan Octavio Prenz (1932–2019) spent part of his life in Belgrade, where he worked as a professor of Spanish at the University. During his stay, he learned Serbian and actively participated in the cultural life of the capital and of Yugoslavia as a whole. Prenz published in Madrid the book El Cid y Krallevich Marko: una primera aproximación (1983), in which he offers an overview of the possibilities for comparing the two respective national heroes, as well as a Spanish translation of fifteen poems from the Marko cycle. In this article, we present the main ideas put forward in Prenz’s study and analyze his translation of the poems, comparing them with the original.