But for me as a growing child it was only the litanies and the thought of my missing brother, my hero, that deterred me from regarding the region’s second language — for many their first — as a personal assault on me; and even now, toward the end of the century, the German majority, often in spite of themselves, feel the same way.
It was the old dictionary that first helped me over this prejudice. It was published in the last years of the past century, in 1895 to be exact, the year of my father’s birth. Aiming at completeness, it was a collection of words and phrases from every part of Slovenia. Just as the sun inching over the darkened landscape opposite my desk helps me now to perceive the minutest objects and figures and the spaces between them — the bent arm of the girl sitting by the water, a bowed tree on the horizon, a boy at the end of the path with his face turned toward the girl — so then, under the eaves of the barn, words helped me to see the little things which up until then had almost always been lacking when I tried to visualize a childhood. The first thing that happened was that word by word — my brother had ticked many of them, so I was able to skip quite a lot — a people took shape before my eyes. Its members were an exact replica of the villagers at home, but they did not, as in the usual stories and anecdotes, shrivel into types, caricatures, and clichés; I saw only the glowing outlines of people and things. These words sprang from a rural people whose metaphors had their source in country life: “He uses his tongue the way a cow uses her tail.” “You’re as slow as fog on a windless day.” “Your house is as cold as a burned-out barn.” But cities didn’t frighten them, they were waiting to be conquered. The country-folk would “rattle” to town in the wagon or “glide” there in the sleigh. The vocabulary of profanity was rich and varied; “he swore his last” was a way of saying “he died.” These people had any number of terms for dying, but even more for the female sex organ. From one valley to the next, the names for varieties of apple and pear changed, they were as numerous as the stars in the sky (which were named after farm implements or called “reapers” or “mowers,” or simply, like the Pleiades, the “Densely Sowed Ones”). As the Slovenes had never set up a government of their own, they had to resort to literal translations from the German or Latin of their overlords for everything connected with politics, public life, or, for that matter, conceptual thought — which seemed as stilted as if I were to say “far-writer” for telegraph; on the other hand, the language had familiar names, nicknames as it were, for all ordinary objects, and not just the useful ones. Everything indoors seemed to have been named by women, and everything outside by men. A kind of bread baked under hot ashes was called, to translate literally, “underash,” and a variety of pear, “the little woman.” It is typical of this language that the addition of a mere syllable, and not of another word, can transform words for large areas into diminutives, which serve as names for the things and creatures in these areas. The area becomes, as it were, a refuge and hiding place for the creatures that bear its name. A wood, for example, harbored “woodsies,” a word that could designate not only a human inhabitant of the wood but equally well, wood rushes, a particular species of forest flower, a wild cherry tree, a wild apple tree, a wood nymph, and — the heart as it were of the forest — the coal titmouse. It was through finding unaccustomed names for things in the dictionary that I first acquired a feeling for them.
Thus I discovered a people as tender as they were crude, a people with many different ways of scoffing at those who were quick to think and slow to act; an industrious people (“When it comes to work, we Slovenes are miles ahead,” my brother wrote in a letter) whose adult language is shot through with children’s expressions; taciturn and almost mute in despair, voluble and almost eloquent in joy and yearning; without aristocracy, without military marches, without land (their land was leased), without kings, their only king being the legendary hero who wandered about in disguise, showing himself only briefly. But, on second thought, what words made me aware of was not specifically the Slovene people or a people at the turn of the century, but rather an indeterminate, timeless, extrahistorical people — or better still, a people living in an eternal present, regulated only by the seasons, in an immanent world obedient to the laws of weather, of sowing, reaping, and animal diseases, a world apart from, before, or alongside of history. (I am aware that my brother’s tick marks contributed to this static image.) How could I help wanting to count myself among this unknown people that has none but borrowed words for war, authority, and triumphal processions, but devises names for the humblest things — indoors for the space under the windowsill, out of doors for the shiny trace of a braked wagon wheel on a stone nag — and is at its most creative when it comes to naming hiding places, places for refuge and survival, such as only children can think up — nests in the underbrush, the cave behind the cave, the fertile field deep in the woods — yet never feels obliged to call itself “the chosen people” and distance itself from “the nations” (for, as their every word shows, this people inhabits and cultivates its land)?
Just as my brother’s copybook, without excursions through another language, translated itself directly into his work, his orchard, so now his dictionary led me beyond the orchard into the whole landscape of childhood. Childhood? Was it my particular childhood? Was it my personal places and things that I discovered through names? Unquestionably, the scene of action was my father’s house. With the help of the word for the space behind the stove, for the beam under the cider barrel in the cellar, for the stone-rimmed watering trough in the stable, for the last furrow in plowing, I visualized the corresponding object in or around our own house. It took only a word to evoke the broad end of “our” scythe, or “our” cling peaches, or the blue mist on “our” plums; and to lift even our subsoil — the layer of gravel under the humus, the pit where we stored our fodder beets — into a realm of light and air. And there were many words that communicated images of things which I had never seen but which must nevertheless have related to our life at home. Our horse, for instance, had never had an eelback, but once I had the word for it, I saw a horse with just such dark stripes in the village paddock. Nor had I ever heard the voice of the queen bee, which now, thanks to the onomatopoeic verb, resounded from within my father’s abandoned apiary and penetrated my innermost being, followed by the sound, “as of boiling plum butter,” of a whole swarm of “our” bees. Yes, “one who produces whirring sounds on a birchwood flute” was I myself, the reader of the one word for all that, and likewise it was I who, immersed in “the blade of grass on which strawberries are strung,” emerge forthwith from our community forest beyond the Seven Mountains, holding that same blade of grass in my hand.