Marko Sošič passed through Motovun on another of his walking tours of Istria, and he left me a new book of his, which was published earlier this year by the Slovenian Book Agency in Ljubljana. Entitled From Earth and Dreams: Short Stories, it actually contains a single story from an earlier volume by that name entitled “To the Last Name.” It comes in the original Slovenian and eleven of its translations in as many languages. Four pages long, the story about the recent war in what used to be Yugoslavia thus covers some seventy pages. Having read it in the original, I leaf through the rest of the slim volume. In alphabetic order, the languages boggle the mind: Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish. When I turn to my laptop, I immediately go for my electronic mail. I thank Marko from the bottom of my heart, but I end my message with a petty complaint. That is, one language that is missing is my own: English. And I could have done something about it had I known about the book while it was in the works. In fact, there is one more missing language in it, which I did not dare even mention: Serbo-Groatian or Croato-Serbian. Now it is known as Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian or BCS from the interminable court proceedings in The Hague.

Addendum (March 31, 2014)

I thanked Marko for the book via electronic mail, and I sent him the link to this piece. His effusive response came this morning. “It is always a pleasure to see you and talk to you,” he starts. “It is an honor to have met you,” he continues, “because I know your soul is true.” He ends by thanking me for my attention to his book. He does not say a word about my language, though. This is something we will talk about the next time we meet. For English became my language for true during the internecine strife in Yugoslavia, which now lays dead and buried.