Fishing and Fishermen's Talk

Fishing and Fishermen's Talk also translated as Fishing and Fishermen's Conversations(Croatian: Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje) is the most important literary work of Croatian Renaissance poet Petar Hektorović, finished on January 14, 1556, and printed in 1568 in Venice. Ribanje is a pastoral and philosophic narrative poem in three parts in which Hektorović describes in a letter to his cousin, his three-day boat trip from Hvar to Brač and Šolta, accompanied by a pair of Hvar fishermen, Paskoje Debelja and Nikola Zet.

As a literary piece Ribanje has been variously classified in Croatian literary history as an epistle, as a fishermen eclogue or epic poem, and at other times as a documentary travelogue.

According to its content Ribanje is the first piece of Croatian literature written in verse in which travel is not described allegorically, but as a real journey, describing the beauties of nature and homeland. It's a travelogue of a Renaissance man who enjoys nature and considers it to be a refuge for man's spirit where it can achieve complete relaxation and invigoration. Ribanje is the first described tourist journey of a modern, Renaissance man in Croatian literature; it is a first piece of Croatian culture in which world is described by parameters of human's concrete, earthly needs. To sum it up, Ribanje is the first secular, mimetic, realistic travelogue of Croatian literature.

In the poem the narrator—the poet himself—describes his journey across Adriatic islands and recounts events that he and his co-travellers experienced along the path. The narrator, great aesthetist and sensitive to beauty, often describes the landscape the company sailed through, admiring the beauties of his homeland.

The descriptive accounts of Ribanje combine the narrative parts in which events of the journey are detailed, along with the fishermens' complaints, dialogues and conversations. The poet-narrator often cites the conversation of the fishermen, quoting the truth, as he sees it, of their wise sayings and intelligent conversations.

Hektorović meticulously recorded the songs sung by the fishermen along the way, making this one of the earliest examples in Croatian literature to include transcribed folk music within the text. There are two bugaršćicas and three short songs, toasts or honorific songs, sung alternatively by the fishermen. This makes Ribanje a work that makes an interesting and aesthetically valuable synthesis, a blending of artistic and folk literature.

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