ABSTRACT
I first read the moving and mysterious verse of the Slovene poet Edvard Kocbek (1904-1981) at one remove: in a Croatian fishing village. After leaving France, then northern Italy, we had driven past the southeastern Alps of Austria, crossed the Slovene foothills where Kocbek was born, then headed south down the winding cliff-hanging highway of the Dalmatian coast. Even well south of Split, in Igrane, Kocbek’s Slovenia was not far away. As generals, kings, dip lomat, dictators, “ethnic purifiers,” and—alas—peaceful civilians have known for some twenty centuries, the Balkans represent a mountainous, geopolitically turbulent, yet relatively small European region. And if I still felt close to Kocbek, even as I was otherwise immersing myself in Croatian life and manners, it was also because Slovene—as a southern Slavic language—is akin to the Croatian with whose rudiments I was wrestling by means of a conversation manual and the only dictionary at my disposal: a French-Serbian bilingual lexicon that I kept hidden. (This French-Serbian dictionary was obviously a reworked re-edition of a Serbo-Croatian lexicon; today, no one speaks of “Serbo-Croatian,” but for historical, linguistic, and literary reasons the recent divorce of the adjectives that has become de rigueur because of the ethnic bloodshed is actually quite a complicated affair.)
