by Peter Handke
Foreign languages had fascinated me as a child. The one coffee tin in our house, with the curly-black-haired dancing girl on it, led me years later to study the dark beauty’s language—Spanish; and I copied at least the first lessons of the Hungarian grammar I had brought home from the seminary, which attracted me first by its smell and then by the exotic look of its words. The Slovene language, on the other hand, which I heard every day in the village, had rather repelled me. Not so much because of its Slavic sound as because of the many German words that kept intruding; I heard the dialect of the villagers not as a language but as a ridiculous hodgepodge. My father would often humiliate his fellow cardplayers by imitating their manner of speaking—a mumbling, a gargling, a barbaric spitting out of gutturals—and following up with a sentence of his own pure, melodious Slovene (thus once again showing himself to be the master of the group). But even where the standard language was spoken, it usually sounded menacing to my ears, chiefly because the places where it was used suggested official announcements rather than communication. On the radio, the short daily broadcast in the foreign language was cut in like news of a disaster; in school, meaningless sentences served only to drum grammar into our heads; and in church, the priest, as he delivered his sermon, often switched in spite of himself to German, which seemed far better suited to his purpose, and continued quietly what in the Slavic language he had had to thunder out, sentence by sentence, in a tone of condemnation.
Only the litanies, even more than the hymns, made me prick up my ears. I joined with all my heart in entreating the Saviour to have mercy on us and the saints to pray for us. In the dark nave, filled with the now unrecognizable silhouettes of the villagers turned with their voices toward the altar, the Slovene syllables—those of the priest changing, those of the congregation unchanging—resounded with infinite fervor. It was as though we were all lying prostrate, addressing our supplication to a closed heaven. Those foreign sequences could never be long enough for me; I wanted them to go on and on, and when the litany came to an end, I experienced not a dying away but a breaking off.
I lost this feeling at the seminary, where the few Slovene-speakers aroused antagonism and suspicion in the others. Unlike the voices in school, on the radio, and in church, they spoke their language softly, hardly above a whisper, and this in a far corner of the study hall, so that the rest of us heard no more than an incomprehensible hissing. The rectangle of desks in which they stood as though entrenched, with their backs to the world, gave them a conspiratorial air, accentuated by the shouts coming from all sides. And what about me? Did I envy them their huddled heads? Did I begrudge them their evident solidarity? No, my feeling went deeper. It was abhorrence. At the sight of this conceited band of the elect, dissociating themselves from the rest of us, from the mob among which I—alone, jostled, jostling back, warmed only by the blue cavern of my desk and by sleep—had to count myself. I wanted these no-good Slovenes to shut up and crawl out of their entrenchment, I wanted every single one of them to feel as homeless in his assigned seat as I did, with some stinking, panting, scratching foreign body beside him. I wanted him to go out and exercise in silence, without the comforting whispers of his fellow conspirators in his ears, but only the splashing of the seminary fountain, to share the lot of Filip Kobal, who finds your clannish minority even more nauseating than the speechless, disunited, directionless majority standing around with hanging heads and clenched fists.
Not until much later did one of these Slovene-speakers tell me the truth: that they did not band together against the rest of us; meeting in their corner had been their only way of hearing their own language after a day of having to talk in a foreign tongue, for their language was frowned upon not only by the German-speaking pupils but by the prefects as well. If they spoke softly, it was for fear of giving offense, and they spoke only of indifferent matters, the weather, school, the packages of sausage and ham they received from home, though even such conversation had been a great comfort to them. The familiar sounds they offered one another were like “the bread and wine of Communion”; the few moments of the day when they could at last be among themselves with their persecuted language were for them “hallowed moments” even if they had deliberately spoken only of the most commonplace things. “Doesn’t it make a difference,” cried my informant, “if I can say njiva instead of field, or jabolko instead of apple?”
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 wi
th 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.
At that point I thought of my teacher, the writer of fairy tales, who precisely because he was absent had been a kind of prop to me in the course of my journey. There was never any plot in his fairy tales; they were mere descriptions of objects, and each story dealt with only one thing, a thing which, as accessory or scene of action, must have been familiar to readers of folk tales. The subject of one tale was a hut in the forest, but without a witch, without lost children, without fire (except at the most for a puff of chimney smoke, soon carried away by the cold wind); and beyond the Seven Mountains there was nothing but a brook, so clear that its bed could be mistaken at first sight for a road—fish could be seen swimming over its dark elongated paving stones until at last the water, rushing over a round protruding rock, gave forth an endless sound. The only one of his fairy tales in which anything “happened” was a description of a bramblebush (of course without a struggling Jew tearing himself to pieces in it); this bush is in the middle of an impenetrable wilderness but is surrounded by a large circle of sand where, in the final sentence, a first-person narrator suddenly turns up and throws a handful of sand, “and then another, and still another, and so forth and so on,” into the brambles. According to the author, these “one-thing tales” were supposed to be “sun tales” and manage without the usual “moonlight of spooky additives”; “sun and subject,” he thought, were fairy tale enough; they were the “situation.” A single glance at a treetop, he held, sufficed to produce a fairy-tale atmosphere.
Seen as a collection of one-word fairy tales, the dictionary did the same thing for me: it gave me images of the world, even when, as in the case of the strawberries strung on their blade of grass, I had not actually experienced them. Around every word I came across in my ruminations, a world took shape, as much around “an empty chestnut husk” as around “the wet tobacco left at the bottom of a pipe” or even “a sunshower” or “the white weasel,” which also means “a saucy beautiful girl.” And just as certain passages in my brother’s letters, comparable to the fragments from the Greek seekers after truth, had a kind of halo around them, so now isolated words traced circles that made me think of a prehistoric figure who lived in the hazy centuries before those early stammerers, namely, of the legendary Orpheus. Only a few of his idiosyncratic terms had survived; neither his poems nor his songs had been thought worth collecting, only his peculiar names for things: “woven chains” for the furrows in fields, “bent shuttles” for plows, “threads” for seed grains, “Aphrodite” for the sowing season, “the tears of Zeus” for rain.
On me, too, word circles had the effect of fairy tales, for though the terrible, the repellent, and the evil were amply represented in them, they were only a component which took its place in the whole and, in the dictionary at least, could never win out. My teacher found fault with the stories I had been writing at the time, saying that I had a weakness for the macabre, that I was positively addicted to the gloomy and gruesome; the law of writing, by contrast, was to create, letter after letter, syllable after syllable, the brightest of brightnesses; even a last breath, he said, must be transformed into the breath of life. And now, immersed in the dictionary’s “rain of blood,” “rat turds,” “spittle of disgust,” “the fecal sausages of the earthworm,” “shoes moldering in a corner,” a beast named “understone” (a viper), a place called “land of moles” (the grave), I felt free from my addiction to the gruesome or even to the tragic and found in the contemplation of names a pattern in the world, a plan, which transformed country people and a village house into world people and a big-city house. Every word circle a world circle! The crux of the matter was that every circle emanated from a single foreign word. When people felt unable to communicate an experience, weren’t they always wailing: “Oh, if there were only a word for it!” And in moments of recognition, weren’t they much less likely to say “Yes, that’s it!” than “Yes, that’s the word!”
But wasn’t I taking the side of a foreign language against my own? Wasn’t I attributing this one-word magic exclusively to Slovene, at the expense of my native German? No, it was both languages together, the single words on the left and the circumlocutions on the right which—sign after sign—curved, inflected, measured, circumscribed, constructed space. How fortunate was the existence of different languages, how meaningful was the allegedly so destructive Babylonian confusion! Wasn’t the Tower of Babel actually built, though in secret, and didn’t it, after all, reach up into the heavens?
Day after day, I opened the book of wisdom more excitedly. Is there any word for the adventures I was experiencing? What can one say to express the simultaneous experience of childhood and landscape? There is a word, a German word, and that word is Kindschaft!3 I clap my hands in amazement!
Time and again in my afternoons on the plateau I applauded the epic of words. And I laughed as well, not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of recognition and complicity. Yes, there is a word for the bright spot in a cloudy sky, a word for the wa
y an ox runs back and forth on a hot day when he’s stung by a horsefly, for flame suddenly bursting from a stove, for the juice of stewed pears, for the star on a bull’s forehead, for a man on all fours extracting himself from the snow, for a woman stocking up on summer clothes, for the sloshing of liquid in a half-empty bucket, for the trickling of seeds out of seedpods, for the skipping of a flat stone over the surface of a pond, for icicles hanging from a tree, for the raw spot in a boiled potato, for a puddle in clayey ground. Yes, that’s the word!
But was my plan still valid? Wasn’t the word for “the sound of two alternating flails” obsolete, since the corresponding implements had for years been hanging inactive in the museums? Wasn’t “the sound of a falling body” the meaning that survived? Didn’t the term which in the past century designated only “emigration” lose its innocence when the events of the last war changed its meaning to forced “resettlement”? Didn’t the old book suffer from the absence of resistance fighters, of partisans, for whom the “partisan,” that obsolete, halberd-like weapon, was hardly a substitute? And even back at the time when the dictionary was compiled, were there not a striking number of designations for places where something had been but was no longer—for fallow land “where barley formerly grew,” for the place “where the barn used to be,” the stone surface “where bushes used to grow”? And even at that time, were footnotes not appended to certain particularly inventive designations, to the effect that they were no longer in use? And hadn’t the scholars included in their book any number of words which even their source, the oldest inhabitant in the most remote valley, had stopped using except in word games? So, instead of saying that words had fairy-tale magic, wouldn’t it be wiser to say that they performed the function of a questionnaire: What is my situation? What is our situation? What is the present situation?