Vladimir Nazor is a prominent personality from Croatian culture, he had Mitteleuropean qualities of spirit and lived at the turn of the nineteenth century. Despite being an author of exceptional prosaic pages, his dreams, passions and emotions linked to everyday life are more clearly reflected in his poetry. As a multilingual and multicultural intellectual, he translated from and to Croatian, Italian, French and German. This essay considers his Italian personality crowned with his wish to use his own translations as a bridge between Croatian and Italian cultures. The research aim is to analyse Nazor’s translation of the sonnet “L’infinito” by Giacomo Leopardi (“Infinity,” 1950a) into Croatian, with a special overview of Frane Čale’s version (1993). The translational characteristics of the social poem “Morgue of the Miserable” by Dobriša Cesarić, in versions by Vladimir Nazor (“Casa di morti miserissimi,” 1997) and Marija Kinkela (“L’obitorio dei miserabili,” 1981) will be discussed.
