Lilith, Sinnlichkeit und Farben [Lilith, Sensuality and Colours]

Laura Marchig is one of the most important Italian-writing authors in Croatia. She belongs to a generation that grew up under socialism, with rock 'n' roll as bread for the soul, and at the same time with the language of Dante. This generation, tired and spent after the war, a war for democracy, is skilled at living within another, Slavic culture, and it has learned to love this culture, which it knows at least as well as its own.

In her poems, Laura Marchig addresses the marginal position of the Italian minority in Fiume/Rijeka, Istria and the Bay of Kvarner, which is increasingly distanced from Italy and at the same time attracted to this land of overwhelming tradition. She describes it as a place of powerful feelings and contradictions, determined by the Slavic world around her, which smells "of honey and onions". But for the poet, every attempt to free herself from this place painfully inscribes itself in her body, leaving "traces on her skin and bitter blood".
The lyrical I perceives the world through sensuality, a consciously feminine sensuality that gives and takes with everything available ? with hands and breasts, eyes and lips, hips and belly. Laura Marchig's poetry draws on the tradition of Italian and European literature; but the strongest impulses are provided by the Croatian authors she translates and authors like Enrico Morovich or Fulvio Tomizza, who, like her, have written from a geographical marginal position.