Two songs about snow

My growing up was asynchronous. From the very beginning, I have been aware of a slight mismatch between my personal time and the prevailing time of the world. The majority of people seem to have similar perceptions regarding this issue, perhaps even universal ones; it’s hard to imagine that they might be different. What I have in mind here are those early childhood years when one's personality is being formed, yet not completely imprinted in one's consciousness. It is a time that belongs to us, but it is also incredibly alien, forever immersed in a kind of blurry fog that makes it simultaneously the most profoundly ours and the most profoundly somebody else's. During those years, decisions were made for us by others. It was others who were cutting into the magical membrane of the world for us, little by little widening the opening so that we might fit into it somehow, spreading before us the canopy of language, ideology, forms and manners; but they were simply people from another time, just as their elders had been when they were children. It seems, then, that we are all in a way shaped a little in reverse, a fate imposed on us by the chronological logic of time. As we grow up, we more or less emancipate ourselves from this given and gradually fall in step with our world.

At first, I delayed this process, possibly due to my own "nature" (which was itself a result of a complex network of forces from which our time is woven), and later perhaps consciously, looking back much more than was advisable according to the customs of the epoch. This formative process – the transition from a pre-conscious to a conscious state, the birth of the self – can be traced throughout my life to this day and is evident even in these lines. In my case, it unfolded in parallel with two significant, in many ways paradigmatic, changes: one relating to the disturbing, violent shift in the political, cultural and social horizon (which influenced me greatly with its tenets), and the other to the more or less simultaneous technological revolution.

I was born in Split, in the year of the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. I come from a working-class and a military family, from a so-called mixed marriage, and neither side of my family was religious. I belong to the last generation to start school in Yugoslavia. The one that recited the Pioneer Oath, and, in its short childhood, experienced safety and peace, post reassignments and relocations, disintegration and war. So, just when I became fully conscious, the very foundations of that consciousness disappeared. I was Yugoslavia, but Yugoslavia was no more. My generation was simply too young to find any meaning in all this. However, we experienced this small identity accident first-hand, although we would only understand and reflect on it much later. And then came the network of all networks, and the inexhaustible digital archives which, along with the door to the future, opened wide a window into the past that was just as interesting, if not even more important, for me. It seems that the horizon of my intimate world, as well as that of music, literature and film, remained fatally anchored in an era that was considered undesirable.

Leaning on the glass-strewn windowsill of my personal history, I reflect upon this and many other things as I slowly travel by bus from Trieste to Rijeka, past the wooded sinkholes. It all started some fifteen days ago in Nova Gorica. Along with Gorizia in Italy, it is currently the "double", or possibly mirrored, European Capital of Culture. It must be added that this mirror image is not only separate in terms of space, given the revolting axis of the border, but also in terms of time, just as I have remained somewhere deep within myself. So I decided to divide my half-month residential stay there in half. I would spend a week in Gorizia and in Nova Gorica, then walk for a week across the Karst to Trieste, Devin and Tržič, tracing the footsteps of my grandmother, who was born in Sežana, and of Srečko Kosovel, who was born only a few streets away. He was my first and, for many years, my only poet, a fateful one. I was raised by Grandma Marija, who launched me into life, while Srečko Kosovel introduced me to literature by making language real for me. Later, I spent time in company of Tomaž Šalamun, Scipio Slataper, Werner Herzog, Peter Handke and Ottó Tolnai; the first and the last of them remain intimately important to me. This also meant a return to Slovene, a language I grew up in, but hardly ever spoke. After two weeks of immersion, it prickled in my head like a swelling, mingling into a strange cauchemar with the other languages present there at the time after a few days spent in Friuli, mostly with the pathetic remains of Italian I had learned at school.

Srečko Kosovel: A Small Coat (Open: Selected Poems and Thoughts, selected and edited by Mateja Kralj, translated by Ana Jelnikar and Barbara Siegel Carlson, designed by Simon Kastelic, published by Društvo Konstruktivist Sežana, 2018)

I was thinking slowly, but the past was simply too vast, and we had already left the Kvarner Bay behind. Before I could gather my thoughts, we began to climb into the darkened hills. The driver turned up the heating, which I appreciated: it was the beginning of October and I was still wearing summer clothes, but a rapid change in the weather overnight had lowered the Indian summer temperatures suitable for swimming in the sea to late-autumn ones, soaked by persistent rain. I looked up and, suddenly, as if in a kind of Hasanaginica[1] ballad, I saw the first snowflakes descending onto the pine branches framed by the window.

For a quarter of a century, whenever I see the first snow, my asynchronous, deeply divided mind, which is prone to literal thinking, but slave to the conditional reflex, unmistakably pulls out of the naphthalene and starts playing two melodies, always the same two blameless songs about snow. However, the automated DJ in the cortex plays them simultaneously, so that their lyrics and harmonies mix with one another and clash, their languages blending, creating an impression of a village fair and a night terror at the same time.

The first one is called simply First Snow (Prvi snijeg), written in the second half of the 1970s by Dušan Mihajlović, better known as Dr Spira, the spiritus movens of a pioneer new-wave group called Doktor Spira i Ljudska Bića. Although not particularly famous on the Yugoslav scene at the time, the group has since acquired a kind of cult status, and its members still get together from time to time in different formations to record or play live some of their best-known material. Spira himself has written and produced songs for other artists too. However, his best-known song remains this foggy, melancholy ballad to this day. Originally recorded in 1977 by the acoustic group called Suncokret, it featured three outstanding female vocalists: Snežana Jandrlić, Biljana Krstić and Gorica Popović, and the singer and guitarist Bora Đorđević, who at the time was immersed in the hippie love-and-peace scene, but later became a renowned rock poet and notorious Četnik agitator.

Ten years after Suncokret, Dr Spira recorded it himself for the album Dizajn za stvarni svet, in at least two versions. In one version, the microphone is taken over by Slađana Milošević, the new-wave artist and later Topić's would-be Eurovision "Princess",[2] and in the second version, Spira sings himself in a somewhat rawer arrangement, adding a commentary dimension to the lyrical songwriter's performance. This song is thus also divided internally, a kind of musical rendering of Dictionary of the Khazars, mirrored on vinyl and in my inner ear: on the one hand, the feminine, dreamy three-part vocal performance by Suncokret and Slađana's later version, and on the other, Spira's hypnotic, and at the same time slightly caricatured, blues-like mumbling. The song, with its repeated announcement of "hard, hard times" and "our silences" linked to snow, is now playing in my left ear on a few different, yet simultaneous, vocal channels while the Fužine Mountains, framed by the fogged-over window, glide past, submerged in whiteness.

The second, which is playing simultaneously in my right ear, although there is no cacophony, has a similarly literal and utterly transparent title: It Is Snowing (Sneguje). It was recorded by legendary Marko Brecelj, co-founder of Buldožer, with his group Javna dvaja at the time of the last Balkan peace in the late 1980s. With its basic premises, concept and spirit, were it garnished with a slightly more classical arrangement by Bojan Adamič, the song would fit nicely on Brecelj's debut studio album, Cocktail. It is a song typical of Brecelj, yet an atypically melancholic poem about the road and home, which – through a series of associative, slightly Dylanesque rhymes – takes us to a unique and universal, personal and general day, brought closer and made more distant by the snow.

In the song, the snow falls on Ljubljana and the world, turning it through a kind of literary technique both into fiction and a poetic painting. Celovška Cesta is white, but the snow is unrelenting, it keeps falling until the entire grey, sleepy town is white. Before me, the deserted motorway spreads out like a carpet. It's true that there's hardly any snow on the asphalt; it melts as soon as it touches the ground. In my mind, the two beautiful literalities of the same blizzard, one in Serbo-Croatian and the other in Slovene, collide, and my own faded, dusty associations – traces of someone else's era, yet still mine – are brought to life once again in an inaudible space of sound. There is snow on the pines of Gorski Kotar, and above them, an odd black crow. It's really snowing hard.

What can we do? Ne vem, pa da ga jebem,[3] would say my grandpa Tone, a Yugoslav Navy officer from Dolenjska who was stuck for life in Split, where snow is almost a miracle. But the snow keeps falling as if nothing were happening.

Translated by Lili Potpara

Language editing by Fiona Thompson

The project On the Balcony of the Balkans, hosted on the AirBeletrina portal, seeks to foster intercultural dialogue and strengthen cooperation among artists, institutions, and countries of the former Yugoslavia. It is not rooted in nostalgia or focused on the past, but is instead centered on present realities and, above all, aimed at reflecting on the future, as it seeks to contribute to the most successful possible development of the region. It is carried out with the support of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia.

[1] Hasanaginica, a South Slavic folk ballad created in the Imotski region during the period 1646–1649, when the area was part of the Ottoman Empire's Bosnia Eyalet.

[2] Reference to the song "Princeza", performed by Slađana Milošević and Dado Topić in 1984 at the Yugoslav Song Contest, which was not selected for the Eurovision Song Contest.

[3] The phrase in Slovene translates roughly as "I don't know, fuck it".