Croatian festival's a winner with me

This is a huge event in the Croatian calendar, and a country-wide celebration of poetry.

It's been one of the most exhausting weeks of my life! Unlike our own more sedate affairs, a poetry festival Croatian-style involves a large bus, all the country's leading poets and lots of drinking.

The idea of including five poets in the festivities was to encourage some kind of exchange: of poetry, of ideas, of ways of approaching poetry.

The first barrier to overcome in this was our complete lack of knowledge of Croatian.

It's a wonderful-sounding language, full of bristling accents and galloping syllables, but there's no familiar place for the foreigner to get a hold.

However, it is a phonetic language. What you see on the page is exactly how it is pronounced.

This fact enabled me to attempt to recite a poem in Croatian - and win a prize.

We began our trip in the capital Zagreb, a bustling, atmospheric city with red-tiled roofs, a towering cathedral and countless coffee shops and bars.

We met the country's most famous poet, Branko Eegec, a big, brooding man who looked exactly what we imagine a poet to look like.

With him, the first night of eating, drinking and talking began.

Dinner for Croatians can last for hours - so can lunch, which is why for several days the two meals blended in to one seamless day of happy consumption.

The record for dinner during our stay was seven hours - and for lunch, four.

I mentioned this to some of our new friends and they laughed. 'Croatians love to eat and to drink! They love to live!' Perhaps the long war they suffered has only emphasized this.

Evidence of the war was subtle, but everywhere. In Zadar, the ancient coastal town where we made our next stop, shell holes pitted the walls of the stone buildings, and there were Wanted posters pinned up of those wanted for war crimes.

But the joie de vivre of the Croatians was unstoppable, and though we knew that some of those with us had lost family and friends in the fighting, it was clear the Croatian Poetry Festival was time to talk about other things.

The tour involved readings, for which the festival and the British Council provided translations and an actor to read the Croatian versions.

It also involved workshops in schools in and around Zagreb, where we found children who were excited and thrilled by poetry and took to it easily. Slowly, we began to get a sense of the poetry the Croatians write and how it is different from our own.

In Britain, poems are often tiny stories told in verse - they have a structure and a punchline. Croatian poetry is nothing like this. It is full of images and leaps of the imagination, more philosophical and less of a story. And it is beautiful. It creates a mood and hints at a greater story. I loved its subtlety, and the way it sounded.

Which made me think I could have a go. In the competition for Best Poem run by the festival, 50 poets were each to read a poem before a panel. In a moment of madness, fuelled no doubt by the liberal helping of mistletoe brandy I'd been given I asked my neighbour at dinner to give me a crash course in the sounds of Croatian. I wrote them all down above a Croatian translation of my poem 'Your Blue Shirt' and when my turn came I stood up and read it.

Never has that poem received such a cheer. The Croatians loved my attempt at their language, even though it was clearly hilarious to them. For me, it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done - and one of the longest poetry readings. In the middle I faltered, but they cheered me on harder, and when I finished, the room exploded into shouts and clapping, and I was embraced and my hand was kissed by thrilled Croatian poets. I won First Prize, and a lot of books in Croatian that I will never understand, but will stay with me always. After this readings back here will seem to be lacking something somehow.

See the Daily Poem section to read 'My Blue Shirt'.