The Bible, the Slovene Language and Slovene Literature

Abstract

The paper first follows the thread offered by the Slovene protestant translation of the Bible, which, as in other national cultures, had a formative influence on both Slovene language and Slovene literature. It was Trubar’s choice of the target language (which was later Dalmatin’s choice, too) that created the Slovene literary language. But since Trubar also used other translations of the Bible, in particular that of Martin Luther, the Slovene translation of the Bible from the very beginning included lexical and syntactic Germanisms that persisted. So, although this translation was also believed to have established a high stylistic standard, the distinction must be made between the style of the Slovene translation of the Bible in the narrower sense, which was simply not good because of its Germanisms, and the biblical style proper. On the other hand, since its beginnings in the second half of 18^th century, it was Slovene literature that stylistically improved Slovene translation of the Bible by directing it to more idiomatic Slovene expressions. – With the emergence of Slovene literature, a second thread begins, and calls for a further distinction, too. In Slovene literary history, Slovene literature was seen by tradition as a sphere for revealing the national idea and, more widely, as belles lettres, i.e. as a realm of fiction, of the free invention of human deeds. The Bible, however, can be defined, in view of its literariness, as a testimony which bears witness to special events, encounters of man with God, or even to the event of Christ, which means that it tells of the glory of God in human history, to whom, as a complete Other, it also gives shape. So it is not a mere coincidence that in Slovene literary history an act of secularization was postulated as the origin of Slovene literature. – At this point the third thread begins. It was not only Slovene literature that, in view of its foundational act, was regarded as a secularization, but also the procedure by which Prešeren employed biblical terms and images in his high Romantic poetry. Prešeren decontextualized these terms and images, transferring them to the human condition, to an image of man, which, after the Christian image of the world had fallen to pieces, became obscure. So they act as metaphors that provide man with shape, but not with value: it is, on the contrary, man’s own value that is revealed in a form newly brought to him by means of biblical metaphor. In Prešeren’s poetry, this procedure is most evident when he celebrates a beloved woman. To herself, to her overwhelming presence, he transfers no less than “glory”, which in the Old Testament means the radiant presence of God in the earthly realm. Therefore, Prešeren’s secularization of the Bible culminates precisely in this metaphorical transference, establishing a paradigm of high love poetry in Slovene literature. – Here, in the realm of the paradigmatic as far as Slovene literature is concerned, the fourth and final thread takes its place. At the beginning of 20^th century, Cankar established another important paradigm, the paradigm of yearning. Or rather, Cankar gave it its distinctive form. In his literature, yearning takes on the shape of a wish for another, or new, life rather than of a love wish. Its central structural moment is a judgement that has ontological value, because it removes from the world the character of reality, i.e. delivers an annihilating verdict on it. This is why yearning, constantly moved by suffering in a world that also grants it a justification, moves itself out of the world to something different, undetermined: to the new life, which, however, is only a dream-work, void of the real. In one of his short stories from his middle period, Cankar even transforms the judgement of yearning with the help of the Bible into the eschatological judgement, depicting the Last Judgment as Christ’s Second Coming. But in Cankar’s later work, suffering no longer grants yearning the final justification, and the later, in an evidently Christian twist, becomes an in itself unjustified yearning for life after death. – Here the narration of the story of the Bible and Slovene literature ends with one more thread, the thread of life, which leads not only out of the world, but also out of the realm of literature itself.