Žive naj vsi narodi
Slovenian | Fable 5
Before anyone wrote me down, I kept a number for exactly two. Grem, I go. Greva, the two of us go. Gremo, we all go. Most languages let the pair dissolve into the crowd; I hold the pair apart. Two oxen. Two hands. A mother and the one child still awake. My alphabet came late. My arithmetic came first, and it is how I survive: I never lose count of anyone.
Around 1000. I came into these mountains as two rivers of speech, one from the north, one from the east, which may be why I count the way I do. For a while I had princes; peasants set them on a stone and questioned them in me before any bishop got a word in. Then the Franks came, the stone went quiet, and I lived four centuries in breath alone. German held the towns, Latin held God, and I held the kitchens, the hayracks, the lullabies. At Freising a scribe spelled me out in Latin letters so his priests could draw confessions from my speakers. Glagolite po nas redka slovesa. Say after us these few words. My first written act was repentance, dictated by foreigners. Even so, when the candle went out, the page still held me. Breath dies nightly; ink keeps. I noted this.
1550. A preacher in German exile set me in type under a false town and a false name, and on the first printed page he called my speakers lubi Slovenci, beloved Slovenes. Nobody had named them on paper before; Trubar invented my nation by addressing it. He took the speech of his valley, sanded it against the talk of Ljubljana market days, and made a written middle that fifty quarreling dialects could read. Dalmatin gave me the whole Bible and smuggled me south in barrels. Bohorič measured my joints and published the measurements. I had a spine now, margins, a body that could be shelved. So they burned it. Wagonloads to the square, and fire. But the bishop who blessed those fires kept one book back, a heretic’s Bible with papal permission, because his own priests could preach from nothing else. Second lesson: become the tool your enemy must borrow.
1844. The century of merging arrived with a generous offer: pour myself into one broad Illyrian tongue and be safe among millions. One of my poets took the offer and left; I keep his early rhymes like a room nobody enters. Prešeren stayed. He wrote me sonnets to prove I could bear their weight, and a drinking toast with a revolution folded in, which he shelved whole rather than let the censor cut it. In those same years the printers gave my hissing letters little roofs: č, š, ž. Strešica, my people call the mark. Little roof. A nation with no state to its name, and the first shelters it raised were over three letters. After that the work went quietly. Reading rooms. A farmers’ weekly. A dictionary heavy as a ham. Villagers who had never met concluded they must be one people, since their verbs did the same strange things, since they all still said greva. I drew the border a lifetime before any treaty did.
1920. In Trieste that summer they burned my National Hall, and I knew the smell, three centuries stale. That autumn the north voted, and I lost the valleys where my oldest vowels lived. Then came the decrees: a schoolmistress crossed out Jožef, wrote in Giuseppe, and the state believed the boy was changed. Twenty years on, the men with runes on their collars banned me outright and packed my teachers onto trains, so I went into the woods and ran on buried presses, damp paper, partisan ink. After the war I shared a federation with a bigger brother who gave all the military commands. In 1988 they tried four of my men in my own capital in the other tongue, and the square outside answered in mine, and even in that roar I could count the pairs. The answering lasted three years and ended with a country.
A state my size exactly, the byproduct of my stubbornness. A nation is supposed to make its language; I worked the other direction. They needed an anthem, so they reached back for the censored toast and chose, of all its stanzas, the seventh, the one that lifts a glass to every nation on earth, neighbor and stranger alike. Twelve centuries of learning to survive, and my first words as a state were a blessing on everybody else.
Žive naj vsi narodi.