Fishing and fishermens´s conversations and other

Petar Hektorovic (1487-1572) was a humanist, lay architect and co-founder of the Croatian literature. In his democratic, social attitude and artistic innovativeness he is probably the closest to us among the authors of the Croatian renaissance. The word "democratic" means here the appreciation of the Dalmatian, Slavic-speaking, general population, in which Hektorovic saw the repository of a culture worth preserving, and a heed of values and wisdom for all classes. The cycle Fishing and fishermen`s conversations and other things by Petar Hektorovic of Hvarhas been carefully designed and printed by its author. For he had a "cultural-political mission", which corresponded to his the socio-political ideas. This narrow book of 110 pages contains 16 very different texts. The longest, "Fishing and fishermen`s conversations", text 1 of the publication is a describes a three-day boat trip in 1684 Croatian verses. The elderly narrator has undertaken it in the company of two fishermen of his Dalmatian home island of Hvar, partly for recreation, partly for visiting places of memory, partly just to fish, to eat outdoors and to talk with the fishermen or to listen to their songs. This poem since the middle of the 19th century has been read as a charter of Croatian national literature and has often been reprinted, annotated and translated (fully into Swedish, English, Slovenian and hereby also into German). The "other things" hereinafter referred to as text 2 to 16 were either not edited at all or only partially or without comment and in a different order. They have never been reprinted, edited or set in context with each other since the first edition. Not one of them has ever been translated. They have generated very little scientific interest. The reason for this omission may have been that Text 1 may well stand alone, while Texts 2 to 16 have been harmed by their diversity in terms of their length, genre, date of origin, language, even authorship. They seemed to later generations to be inaccessible and more or less negligible. Or has their hybridity withstood a national philological appropriation? For the first time in 450 years, all sixteen texts are reproduced in their original order and language. They are translated, annotated and put in context for the first time since their creation.