Nova Istra

Nova Istra, a literary and cultural journal, first appeared in the summer of 1996 in Pula and has since been published quarterly. It is one of the leading Croatian journals of its kind, published by the Istrian branch of the Croatian Writers’ Union, situated in the fifth largest city in the Republic of Croatia – Pula. The city is culturally, but also less specifically, the social centre of the Adriatic peninsula Istria, the most western and one of the most developed Croatian Regions.

Nova Istra mostly publishes literary pieces, both by Croatian authors and in translation: prose, poetry, drama, essays, studies, reviews, etc. A culturological approach to contemporary and traditional subject matter is particularly favoured. The journal regularly, or at least often, publishes contributions from other art media: film, visual arts, theatre, music (mostly jazz), in addition to contributions from the social sciences and humanities: philosophy and philosophy of science, history, archaeology, ethnology, etc. Young authors frequently appear on the pages of the journal. However, one of the journal’s policies since the first issue has been the aesthetic and generational openness towards permanent contributors and their contributions. Nova Istra, as a culturological project, started its own publishing trade in 1997 (poetry and prose anthologies, bibliographies, translations, collected papers). We would like to single out the Soljan Anthology, a collection of literary-critical and literary-theoretical papers on the most significant and translated Croatian author of the second half of the twentieth century – Antun Soljan.

Pieces written by the most famous contemporary Croatian authors, alongside many talented young writers, have been published in Nova Istra. We single out the contributions on prominent Croats who have notably enriched the European science and culture of their time, some of them being Rugjer Boikovic, Herman Dalmatin (Hermanus Dalmata), and Matija Vlacic Ilirik (Matthias Flacius Illyricus).

The following contributors’ pieces have been translated into foreign languages: Nedjeljko Fabrio, Zoran Feric, Slavko Mihalic, Petar Segedin, as well as the papers on the works of Antun Soljan, Nikola Sop, Tin Ujevic, and others. The journal has in a few volumes published a selection of recent Croatian short stories (The New Croatian Prose).

Editor-in-chief: Boris Domagoj Biletić
Office email: info@dhk-pula.hr

Website: www.dhk-pula.hr
Facebook: www.facebook.com/nova.istra.hr

Among the themes:

– globalization
– (anti)globalization & culture
– identity and contemporariness
– intercultural communication
– poetry of North American Indians
– pluralism of cultures and intercultural understanding
– contemporary Russian short prose
– “spiritual” songs of North American Christians
– contemporary prose of Trieste
– art and ideology
– women’s prose in Russia in the 1990s
– surrealism
– bio-ethical discrimination of women
– anti-globalization movements
– Lithuanian literature and culture
– contemporary visual art
– history of women’s drama
– extermination of certain nations in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century
– new European drama
– modern Russian unrestricted verse
– contemporary Czech poetry
– contemporary Jewish poetry
– Sam Shepard
– anthology of Kurdish poetry
– modern and post-modern architecture
– city-essay
– how to “read” Europe?
– Danish modernists
– Europeanism and “frontierism”
– the influences of William Blake’s poetry on Jim Morrison’s rock music
– love (on love)
– against totalitarianism (Stalin, Tito…)
– Ricœur’s hermeneutics of imagination
– the authority…
– the historical-dialectical game of escapism and terrorism
– the causes of crisis in modern democratic states
– manipulation
– deconstruction and performativeness of body
– Chilean literature
– democracy and the global crisis
– leisure
– the civilisation of Communism
– facts and ideas of the “Novecento”
– a dedication to Wagner
– contemporary bulgarian short stories
– optimism
– politics and politicians
– Croatian literature in the neighbourhood
– the Croats and the Ukrainians
– the greatness of the great man: Gabriel García Márquez
– (Non) Freedom or Democratic Censorship
– Metropolis in a Desert: Architecture as an Illusion
– Gustave Flaubert
– Walter Benjamin: The Images of Disintegration, the Fabrication of Dreams
– Synaesthetics without Sensation?
– On the German Press in Austrian Pula and Istria (1871 – 1918)

In 1998, being thus the first in Croatia, and then in 1999, the journal organized two culturological conferences called “Reading the Signs of Time”, which dealt with the turn of the new millennium from the perspective of the arts, humanities, natural sciences, theology, and other fields.

We wish to single out translational literature, in other words essayist and critical approaches to works of many world-famous writers, authors, and thinkers – both contemporary ones, as well as those whose works, belonging mostly to the western but also to other cultures and civilizations, become in their roots the public good of all people and the common heritage of mankind.

This is why you will come across the Croatian translations of the following authors, or the critical texts, studies, and reviews about them, on the pages of Nova Istra :

Ferenc Barnás, Miron Białoszewski, Roberto Estrada Bourgeois, Jean Echenoz, Gustave Flaubert, Leszek Kołakowski, Pierre Michon, Diego Muñoz Valenzuela, Goliarda Sapienza, Naja Marie Aidt, Alain (Emile Chartier), Vladimir Alejnikov, Monica Ali, Dante Alighieri, Isabel Allende, Yehuda Amichai, Roberto Ampuero, Emil Andreev, Louis Aragon, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paolo Badini, Hermann Bahr, Hugo Ball, Alessandro Baricco, Franz Bartelt, Władysław Bartoszewski, Henry Bauchau, Samuel Beckett, Alois Beer, Frederic Beigbeder, Julien Benda, Walter Benjamin, Émile Benveniste, Nikolaj Berdjajev, Georges Bernanos, Thomas Bernhard, Giuseppe Berto, Alain Besancon, Ugo Betti, Maurice Blanchot, Nicolas Bouvier, Vitaliano Brancati, André Breton, Leons Briedis, Enrico Brizzi, Josif Brodski, Anita Brookner, Pascal Bruckner, Georg Büchner, Anthony Burgess, Richard F. Burton, Dino Buzzati, Antonia Susan Byatt, Massimo Cacciari, Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Albert Camus, Paola Capriolo, Ernst Cassirer, Juana Castro, Francesco M. Cataluccio, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Maurizio Chiarutini, Leonard Cohen, Philip J. Cohen, Peter Coles, John Coltrane, Julian Cope, Daniel Allen Cox, Józef Czapski, Salvador Dali, Robertson Davies, Miles Davis, Ales Debeljak, Alain de Botton, Andrea De Carlo, Michel De Montaigne, Per Denez, D.A.F. de Sade, Fernando Dias Antunes, Wilhelm Dilthey, Kristin Dimitrova, Tove Ditlevsen, Apostolos Doxiadis, Germain Droogenbroodt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Bob Dylan, Ivan Dzjuba, Terry Eagleton, Umberto Eco, Marek Edelman, Albert Einstein, Mircea Eliade, Theodoro Elssaca, Paul Eluard, Dejan Enev, Desiderius Erasmus, Ramon Diaz Eterovic, Alain Finkielkraut, Dario Fo, Alex Garland, Gajto Gazdanov, Jerzy Giedroyc, Beniamino Gigli, William Gillespie, Allen Ginsberg, René Girard, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Emma Goldman, Witold Gombrowicz, Georgi Gospodinov, Romualdas Granauskas, Günter Grass, Vivian Green, Danko Grlic, Boris Groys, Barbara Gruszka-Zych, Leonid Gubanov, Margherita Guidacci, Pedro Juan Gutierrez, James W. Hackett, Gérard Haddad, Claude Hagège, Béla Hamvas, Daniil Harms, Vaclav Havel, Stephen Hawking, Martin Heidegger, Stéphane Hessel, Alfred Hitchcock, Michel Houellebecq, Pavel Huelle, Richard Hülsenbeck, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Eugene Ionesco, Igor Isakovski, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Fleur Jaeggy, Ernst Jandl, Bruno Jasienski, Karl Jaspers, Viktor Jerofejev, James Joyce, Imre Kertesz, Søren Kierkegaard, Danilo Kis, Radosław Kobierski, Aleksandar Simonovic Korotko, Srecko Kosovel, László Krasznahorkai, Karl Kraus, Marko Kravos, Jurij Kublanovski, Milan Kundera, Hari Kunzru, Andrej Kurkov, Katalin Ladik , Sydney Lea, Arian Leka, Kveta Legatova, Gonzalo Lema, Rosa Lentini, Simon Leys, David Lodge, Franco Loi, Gaetano Longo, Domenico Losurdo, Sam J. Lundwall, Curzio Malaparte, Terrence Malick, Saadat Hasan Manto, Sándor Márai, Laura Marchig , Peter Markus, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Robert Marteau, Yann Martel, Walter Mehring, Dieter Mersch, Arvo Mets, Gustav Meyrink, Boleslaw Micinski, Juan Mihovilovic Hernández, Czeslaw Milosz, Kenji Miyazawa, Patrick Modiano, Fulvio Monai, Totti dal Monte, Enrico Morovich, Sergej Morozoff, Toni Morrison, Gustav Munch-Petersen, Diego Munoz Valenzuela, Haruki Murakami, Girolamo Muzio, Azar Nafisi, Jozsef Nagy, Pablo Neruda, Max Nettlau, Saul Newman, Mikael Niemi, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rui Nunes, Michael Ondaatje, Iztok Osojnik, Josip Osti, Amos Oz, Charlie Parker-Bird, Nicanor Parra, Boris Pasternak, Lech Pazdzierski, Viktor Pelevin, Saint-John Perse, Fernando Pessoa, Bernhard Peters, Ljudmila Petrusevskaja, Francis Picabia, Andrej Platonovi Platonov, Irina Poljanskaja, Paula von Preradovic, Pascal Quignard, Élisée Reclus, Carol Reed, Walter Rheiner, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Paul Ricœur, Alexandre Romanes, Gabriel Rosenstock, Pentti Saarikoski, Umberto Saba, Ango Sakaguchi, Abdus Salam, Tomaz Salamun, Pedro Salinas, Rifat Sallam, José Amador Martín Sánchez, José Saramago, Raffaella Sarti, Gino Scartaghiande, Jens August Schade, Bruno Schulz, Kurt Schwitters, Ridley Scott, Walter Serner, Sam Shepard, Naomi Shihab Nye, Martin Sorescu, Xhevahir Spahiu, Steven Spielberg, Emil Staiger, Andrzej Stasiuk, Ilja Stogoff, Italo Svevo, Wislawa Szymborska, Antonio Tabucchi, Susanna Tamaro, Domenico Tarizzo, Torquato Tasso, Henry D. Thoreau, Uwe Timm, Fulvio Tomizza, Michel Tournier, Isacco Turina, Leopold Tyrmand, Tristan Tzara, Ljudmila Ulickaja, Manuel Vargas, César Vallejo, Aleksandar Velicanski, Boris Vian, Marina Visneveckaja, Demetrio Vittorini, Kath Walker (Oodgeroo), Aleksander Wat, Adam Wazyk, Tibor Weiner Sennyey, Johannes Wickert, Oscar Wilde, Karol Wojtyla, Robert Paul Wolff, Wiktor Woroszylski, Banana Yoshimoto, Marian Zdziechowski, Viktor Zenchenko, Péter Zilahy, Ciril Zlobe, Sergio Endrigo, Federca Marzi, Jurga Tumasonytė, Paul Bourget, Suat Engüllü, Gottfried Benn, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Varlam Shalamov, Mario Vargas Llosa

Website: www.dhk-pula.hr