Ivan Cankar: Images from Dreams

Original title: Podobe iz sanj

Paintings

Mitja Ficko

Translation

Erica Johnson Debeljak, Jasmin B. Frelih

Afterword

Katja Perat, Robert Simonišek

Editor of this issue

Tanja Petrič

Copy editor

Jason Blake

Managing editors of the Littera Slovenica edition

Tina Kozin, Tanja Petrič, Agata Šimenc

Cover photograph

Avgust Berthold

Published by Slovene Writers’ Association, Ljubljana

Aksinja Kermauner, President

Website

https://litteraeslovenicae.si/

First digital edition, Ljubljana 2018

I/2018/LVI/145

Special issue

Društvo slovenskih pisateljev

Slovene Writers’ Association

Ljubljana 2018

© Translation: Erica Johnson Debeljak, Jasmin B. Frelih and Slovene Writers’ Association

Without written permission of the publisher any form of reproduction or other use, in full or in part, of this copyrighted work, including photocopying, printing, or storage in electronic form, is strictly prohibited.

Kataložni zapis o publikaciji (CIP) pripravili v Narodni in univerzitetni knjižnici v Ljubljani

COBISS.SI-ID=298295296

ISBN 978-961-6995-51-1 (epub)

IVAN CANKAR

I M A G E S   F R O M   D R E A M S

Translated by

Erica Johnson Debeljak and Jasmin B. Frelih

Paintings by

Mitja Ficko

Ihave never found it easy to write; in recent times each sentence I write is almost physical torment. It is not only the unpleasant and sad external things that bind my weary hand and press my thoughts to the ground. It is probably true that my words would flow more smoothly and with greater joy, if... if there was a little sun, if I could just once take a breath from a full and freed breast, if I could at least once look ahead and at myself without fear, with eyes unobscured. And yet this is not the essence; and I am not the only one among us who would complain were I not ashamed to do so. It is something else, something deeper and much more painful that causes my speech to resemble a tentative, barely intelligible stutter, that makes my thoughts, instead of streaking brightly skyward, flutter uncertainly, not knowing where to go and thus unable to go anywhere.

A young person devises verses, puts rhymes to rhyme; and it all flows smoothly along the riverbed without impediment, all by itself, and, at the end: the perfect likeness of a poem. A sweet jingling sounds in his ear – from where? It is like the memory of something beautiful, warm, which used to be – where, when? Words whisper quietly, mysteriously, they rustle like leaves floating in the wind – but what do they mean? They mean something certainly; the eye turns moist, the heart grows soft from their sound. Love, yearning, sorrow... there are thousands, without number, growing sweeter and more beautiful; they are words, singing gently... and yet they are so strangely distant, as if they were being sung somewhere far behind a mountain by a stranger with a hollow voice, an unknown man who perhaps died already long ago. To him, to this man behind the mountain, these words used to be living creatures with faces and bodies and hot blood flowing through their veins; but to others they are a voiceless, formless mystery, even to this young hand that writes them down, trembling, on a golden-edged sheet of paper. A formless, voiceless mystery; a wall covered with rhymes, behind which is life.

But there comes an hour – not in a flash, like a burst of light from heaven, but slowly, step by step, night by night, when a turbid and silent premonition steals soundlessly into his soul, and does not take shape until it is standing right in front of his face; and this young person sees the dead white-washed wall before him, and his own dead words upon it. He feels offended and humiliated, like a child who, playing with coloured stones, with borrowed words, tries to build a new house, perhaps even a temple. And when this bitter recognition casts a shadow on him, then –

Then he usually shakes off this grim premonition, this cold recognition, and continues writing on the wall, more and with even thicker strokes. It seems to him that the realization was simply despondency, a hesitant mistrust that suddenly overtakes a person, like a common cold or hay fever, and then disappears just as suddenly. The moment he gets over the cold, he is proud of his rhymes again, and sensitive about them in the same way someone deeply aware of his own guilt is churlishly sensitive about his virtue and innocence. With a restless eye, he keeps a lookout for disbelief or ridicule, and he grabs a stranger on the road: “Trust me, or woe unto you!” He is a stumbling block to his fellow man, a nuisance to the wandering pilgrim, yet he is worthy of compassion, because he is a stumbling block and a nuisance mostly to himself.

At these times of grim premonition and cold recognition, something softly beautiful happens, something moving: he reads the piles of verses that he wrote, he laughs in a manner that is half loving, half sorrowful; he binds them with a red ribbon and places them carefully between his notebooks and his love letters so that he may, later, when the nights are long and sleepless, take them out of the drawer with a trembling hand, and in the company of that yellowed paper, of that gentle curved writing, ponder... not the rhymes themselves but the dewy young man who wrote them. When his name is scrubbed from the wall in this manner, he goes happily and faithfully along the right path, the one set for him from the beginning: into this or that office, into this or that workshop, to the lectern or the pulpit, or just into the local tavern, but always to a decent and confidently deserved measure of happiness and respect. And only once in a while, in the calm evening hours, occasionally under the influence of strong wine, does he remember to listen to the rhymes carried on the butterfly wings of a spring wind.

But among all the chosen, all the marked, is the one who hears from the depths of his heart words that are different from those beautiful, distant, foreign ones, purely new and purely his, at first responding dully, fearfully, stutteringly, and then in a manner more manly, more distinct, brighter and louder; until all other voices and lights are forever drowned out in their sound and light. And now look at this wondrous wonder: those distant, foreign, unintelligible words have flown to the paper all by themselves, kindly arranging themselves with the others, as if they had always been on the paper, in the air, in the ear; but the new words, his own words, resist the paper, reject both tongue and pen. They are in his heart; clear inside it, ripe, they cry out to see the light of day; yet their roots extend so deeply into the ground that they must be ripped out by force, without mercy, spilling blood even. But they must be ripped out, this was the order given to him, the order he cannot oppose; it was given to him in the same hour that a new word stirred in his young heart which blossomed too soon; in the moment when he, still half in dreams, first cried out from the depths. It was then that the verdict on his life and its ending was delivered, a verdict of incomparable suffering, equal only to the sweetness within him, a flame inside a flame.

In the beginning, these words were like young flowers, spreading their thin gentle roots into the furrowed soil, mindful of dew and sun: it was easy to shake them loose – there was no sigh, hardly a drop of blood when a happy hand plucked a flower and pinned it to a girl’s blouse. But the roots reach deeper, ever deeper into the earth, splitting the clay, the mighty rocks, twisting and wedging like a living network into the core; where humble flowers once dreamed, wide, tall, dark pine trees now stand – cut them down, uproot them! A single blow of the axe will awaken pain and terror across the whole of these dark woods, the earth itself will cry out. The heart twists in anguish and pain, it defends itself, it would prefer to remain silent; yet silence is forbidden – it must speak of its suffering, for that was the verdict and the command.

Each chamber in the grand dwelling of the human heart has a hidden door that leads to another chamber... and that chamber has a door leading to another... and further, further, without end, from chapel to chapel, from jail cell to jail cell, from mystery to mystery; each stairwell, however dark and steep, leads to other stairwells, even darker and steeper, from depths into depths, from dusk into dusk. It happens that a man thinks that he has already opened the door to the last chamber, that he is at the top of the last stairwell, and that he has faced the bottom itself, which has never before revealed itself to anyone; it is an insolent thought, and also full of despair, a sign of tiredness, a shadow of the cold white hand that will one day mercifully caress his cheek and redeem him. There are moments, hardly realized, when in his despair he desires that merciful hand. “The end is here; I will rest!” he says – but look, there is another stairwell, another door, another mystery... stand up, go, do not delay! “Here is the bottom,” you say, “now all will be revealed!” – but look there, another stairwell, get to your feet, descend into the depths, into the night! From the bottom, from the utmost bottom, he would like to confess and call aloud to all people so they would hear with their ears, see with their eyes – that there is no next day, no final word of redemption, that no one has heard, no one has uttered; it is all delirium, a journey, an endless pilgrimage in the silent catacombs of the heart.

The life lived by this frail body, outside under the loud sun, is but a hazy reflection, an opaque metaphor for the other true life that is locked inside you and me. It is an opaque metaphor that obscures and distorts the real face of man, instead of revealing it in truth. It seems to you that you know your fellow man to the marrow, you saw him at his wedding and at his funeral; and then a word bursts out in fear, in need, in overabundant joy – and suddenly someone else is standing before you, a stranger whom you have never met before, a man who is like you, like everybody, like nobody. Only to the one who is fearless, and has reached into his own depths in search of the final truth, only to him are all metaphors unveiled, the catacombs in the heart of his brother opened.

The pilgrim wanders without rest through these mysterious chambers, down the twilit stairwells descending into the abyss. He sees accumulated treasure that he never imagined, and even more terrors without image or name; there are times when he is so happy he could sing to the heavens, and times when he is so sad that he would fall to his knees and weep. But when he returns from the long journey filled with discoveries, and stands among the people to tell them what he saw – his tongue does not move, the words won’t leave his mouth. And what he finally, with great effort, manages to force, stuttering and whispering, from his throat – for he cannot be silent – is hardly a token, hardly a memory of the things he saw with his own eyes.

He is not afraid, the pilgrim, of an open confession – and why should he be afraid? He knows that in the time he wandered through the chambers and stairwells of his own heart, he also walked with a bright light among the locked sanctuaries of his fellow men, of each and every one of them; he did not have to knock where he entered, for to his gaze, burning with desire, the doors opened wide; wherever he looked, he was home. He knows that in these depths all men are brothers, as they are nowhere else, not even in church. He knows that if they ever glimpsed each other from these depths, the walls between them would crumble as if they were made of ash. There is a market in front of the house; there are peddlers there, merchants, gypsies, and thieves; from every side, everywhere, greed gushes forth, envy flows, hatred sizzles; but when the market closes, and the peddlers, merchants, gypsies, and thieves lock themselves each into their own shack in that real marketplace a hundred feet beneath the earthly one – they are gone: there is only one man; and this man has elevated thoughts; he is noble, free of evil and hypocrisy, his emotion is pure, unselfish, devoted in a universal love that embraces each and every single godly thing. The pilgrim knows all of this and thus is not afraid to openly confess in his own name and in the name of his fellow man.

He is not afraid, but he is ashamed. A person is not ashamed of the vile slippery sins he picked up in the marketplace; he is not ashamed of them because they hang loosely from his coat and could easily fall off as he walks along the street. But he is ashamed of the pure beauty he keeps locked deep inside him, and which remains untarnished amidst the debauchery of the market tavern, unpolluted by the puddles and swamps, by curses and obscenities. He is ashamed of this beauty. He would rather unveil his sinful body than open the door even a crack, allowing his brother to see into that room where a pure light burns, the light that he lit in a lonely hour. He takes care that no one knows of this chapel where he hides his most sacred pains, his most silent joys, the innocence of his youth, his most noble deed, maybe the only one during his long life... He is ashamed of these beautiful things, but he is most ashamed of love.

You, pilgrim, must not be ashamed! You, pilgrim, were commanded by heaven to see what others cannot see, to tell what others cannot tell. You have no right to lock the doors, not even the ones you opened with your own trembling hand. If light lures you from the bottomless depths, you must descend without hesitation or fear, and bring this light to the people. Often your words are clumsy and heavy, they hide like a timid child afraid of strange company; often you withdraw your gaze, lower your eyes, because even you, most of all you, the most outspoken one, are ashamed of love. But each word that you conceal in shame will scorch your heart forever; and you, oh pilgrim, you know this pain! ... Think of your mother, of her, in her grave! Tell me, would you not go down on your bare knees and dig up the grave with your own hands to say to her what you would not say when she could hear? A single word perhaps, just one, concealed by your vain shame, by the stinginess of your heart? Think of all the others, how many there are, who cannot hear you anymore and will never hear you, who waited eagerly for your word, and yet you withheld it! Do not keep silent or you will find yourself lamenting to deaf graves, calling out from the depths as the wind blows your words into the forest and across the fields! ...

How heavy my word is all of a sudden, how full of tears, how painfully it is torn from the frightened heart! ...

Last night I saw a large grave reaching from mountain to sea. A dead man lay inside it, so bright and beautiful that the heavenly stars stared at him entranced. On his face a limitless suffering turned to stone, on his lips, those poor lips, a last reproach quivered: “Count the hours, my son, when you looked upon me with devotion, and thought about me with pure love! Say a warm and gentle word, from the bottom of your heart, and with it, offer a drop of living life! Show me the tears you shed for me, show me the blood you spilled in my name! Your hands are empty; lie down next to me, there is enough room!” –

Oh God, it was just a dream – there is still time, still time! –

The Mirror

But where have I wandered, where have I lived for so many long years? Was it all just a dream and am I only now truly seeing? I was among people all this time, I knew many of them by their names, and I thought I knew many of them also by their faces and their hearts. But now it is clear to me that I was wandering among grey shadows that coiled formless and inconstant before me. I was wandering half asleep, and what I naively used to look at and listen to, feel and touch, was only rarely a distant metaphor for truth, but more often a forgery and a lie. I could have slept through my days to the end and then quietly disappeared among the shadows, a shadow myself, an orphan born blind, deaf, and mute, a weary old man who was never a child.

But the hand of God came from heaven and set upon the earth an enormous mirror whose upper edge was laid against the stars, whose lower edge sunk to the bottom of the sea, and whose sides stretched from dawn until dusk. And all living things on earth looked at God’s magnificent mirror as if under a spell, and their own true images were embodied inside of the mirror, without lipstick or jewellery, without velvet or silk. The sinner stood before the judge and the righteous judge passed judgment in silence.

But is that you? It cannot be you, my friend, most passionate orator, I do not recognize you! Once there lived a young boy who wore a wide black bow, tied in the past manner of artists and barbers. He was thrilled beyond measure, thrilled so to speak by the sheer thrill of it all. He loved his country so much that he wept at the mere mention of its name; he offered it his heart’s blood in the customary way, and was deeply anguished because there was no opportunity for noble heroics in that era. So as not to be reproached for laziness or cowardice, he went rummaging through hiding places looking for cowards, smugglers and selfish men, and when he found one, he grabbed him by the collar and dragged him without mercy to the pillar of shame. He went among the people with tight steps, his forehead wreathed with fair curls, and they pointed at him and whispered: “Look at him, that’s him, that’s the one!” – and the world respectfully paused and parted to make way for him... But is that you, my friend? In the corner of the mirror, all wretched, poor, orphaned, sullied by your own vanity, a tremblingly naked person, skin shrivelled by this low, bodily, cowardly fear that clings shamefully to your groaning bones... Turn away, eyes, look at a nicer place, a different face!

I knew a suit a while ago, respectful from top to bottom. It had a wide collar made out of the finest beaver and was nicely cinched across the belly. Wherever this respectful suit went, people took off their hats and bowed to it, greeting it from their hearts; many an eye was moistened by a strange emotion, just as the eye of a person moistens when, after long days of desolate dusk, he opens the windows wide in the morning and catches a glimpse of the heavenly light beyond the mountains in the east. This suit appeared benevolent from afar; it sprinkled gratitude and peace all around. It did not make coins appear from its wide sleeves, it did not share bread from its lordly pockets, but it smiled gently and kindly. It offered a warm caress, sighed sometimes, and its smile was golden alms to the beggar, sweet consolation to the widow and orphan. Word went before it, as the altar boy goes before the priest with his incense: “Kneel, praise it to heaven, this suit, for it grants mercy, it gives comfort wherever it walks, wherever it looks! ...” But is that broad face not the same one that once hovered proudly above the respected suit? There it is, staring from the mirror, staring with a yellow wolf-like eye, its cheeks hollowed to the bone with greed, its teeth rubbed down by the gold they bit and gnawed. And the suit is nowhere to be seen, the respectful suit with the wide collar made out of the finest beaver – gone, the suit that spread benevolence to all sides – gone; naked, he stands there, shivering in shame; in his hands, in the talons of a vulture, he clutches the purse of Judas and the purse is full to the brim; he clutches it, shivering, until muddy blood oozes from beneath his fingernails, he would like to hide it, but he cannot... Oh, my poor eyes, turn away!

Turn away, poor eyes of mine, but not there, not there, horror is there, horror without compare even in this terrible mirror. I saw her once, Suzana, in the spring, in May. Back then not even the dewy morning sun’s godless kiss could approach her beauty. When she crossed the fields, the flowers turned to her in greeting. And wherever her laughing eye fell, the shadow was extinguished, the stain washed away. That was how youth sang among us, passed by us, the soles of her feet never touching the ground... But now a loathsome rotting wound is on display there looking for the place where it will be the most visible; a pair of dark green-lined eyes, two shameless sins beguiling from beneath a cheap wreath, midnight kisses leeched into swollen lips that now call for company... No more! Nothing more!

Oh, nothing more! But the eyes are under a spell, they do not flinch for an instant, and they keep staring faithfully at what they are most ashamed of and afraid to stare at. As many faces as I ever knew, kind and unkind, they are all unspeakably and horribly transformed into their distorted doubles; and only rarely a silent flickering light shines bright, like a lonely moth above the swamp, a pale face that has not been sullied, a pure heart that went through the honeyed mountain of sin and did not taste it. In God’s mirror, the lie stripped of the stolen clothes of truth now looks at its own nakedness with chattering teeth. Not only did I see individual faces, recognizing them with great effort and an ill premonition, I also saw crowds of people swarming from hill to hill, leaders and idols, once worshipped and splendid, but now just a pile of rubbish beside a pile of dung. And I saw long processions of people, processions before carnival in which there were no brightly dressed, drunken bodies, but only kurent pilgrims with no clothes or ribbons, masks or bells, all naked, dressed only with hearts hanging out of their chests for all to see, filled with spit instead of blood. And I saw nations, mighty and shining, the soul and scourge of humanity, defying God with their abundance and wisdom, fame and might; I saw them... Eyes, have you no more tears?

If you still have any, shed them until there are none left! Who stares at me now from the mirror, among the last, the hidden, the shamed? Have I not seen him before, ages ago in my youth, more beautiful, purer, stronger? If you still have tears, eyes, shed them until there are none left! ... Why should I complain? Remember, you said it yourself: The sinner stood before the judge, and the righteous judge passed judgment in silence. –

Children and Old Men

The children had a habit of talking with each other before they went to bed. They sat beside the tile stove and talked about anything that came to their minds. The evening gloom peered through dusty windows into the room, its eyes full of dreams, and silent shadows rose up from every corner, carrying with them the strangest of tales.

They talked about anything that came to their minds, but to their minds came only beautiful stories, made of sun and warmth, woven from love and hope. Their entire future was a single long bright holiday; there was no Ash Wednesday between Christmas and Easter. Somewhere behind the colourful curtain all of life twinkled and flowed silently from light into light. Their words were half-intelligible whispers; no tale had a beginning, nor a distinct vision, no fairy tale had an ending; sometimes all four children spoke at the same time and none bothered the others; they all stared entranced into that magnificent heavenly light where each word rang true, each tale had its own clear and living image, and each fairy tale its own splendid ending.

The children looked so much alike that in the dusk you could not distinguish the face of the youngest, four-year- old Tonček, from the face of ten-year-old Lojzka, the eldest among them. All of them had narrow and tiny cheeks, and all of them had large, wide open eyes that stared at the distance and at them- selves.

That night something strange from foreign lands entered the heavenly light, and struck mercilessly with a violent hand into the holidays, the stories, and the fairy tales. A letter had announced that their father “fell” in Italy. “He fell.” Something unknown, new, foreign, completely incomprehensible, stood before them now, and it stood there tall and wide; it had no face, no eyes, no mouth. It belonged nowhere; not to the loud life in front of the church and on the street, not to the warm dusk around the tile stove, not to the fairy tales. It was not joyous, and yet neither was it especially sad; for it was dead, it had no eyes to explain with a look why and from whence it came, and no mouth to speak of it in words. Their thoughts stood in front of this large phantom, meek and frightened, as if facing a mighty black wall, unable to move. They approached the wall, blankly stared, and fell silent.

“But when will he return?” asked Tonček, deep in thought.

Lojzka shot him an angry glance:

“But how can he return, since he fell?”

All of them were silent; all four of them stood before the mighty black wall and could not see beyond it.

“I will go to the army as well!” said seven-yearold Matijče with a quick wave of his hand, as if he had grabbed hold of the perfect thought and knew exactly what to say.

“You are too small!” four-year-old Tonček, still tucked in a coverall, warned him.

Milka, the smallest and most sickly among them, wrapped in her mother’s too large headscarf, so that she looked like a travel bundle, asked with a soft silent voice that sounded as if it came from somewhere beneath a shadow:

“But what kind of army is this, Matijče, tell me… tell me a story!”

Matijče explained:

“Well, an army is like this: people stab each other with knives, cut each other with swords, and shoot each other with guns. The more you stab and cut, the better, and nobody scolds you for it because that is how it must be. That is an army.”

“But why do they stab and cut each other?” asked Milka, helpless.

“For the Emperor!” said Matijče, and they all fell silent. Somewhere in the distance, in front of their veiled eyes, something magnificent appeared, illuminated with bright glory. They did not move, their breath hardly dared to escape their mouths, as if they were in church before a great blessing.

Then Matijče waved his hand and caught a second thought, perhaps only to dispel the grim silence lying over them.

“I will go to the army as well… I will march upon the enemy!”

“But what does the enemy look like… does he have horns?” Milka suddenly asked in her thin voice.

“Of course he does… how could he be the enemy otherwise?” claimed Tonček, serious and almost angry.

Matijče did not know the answer.

“I think he does not!” he said slowly, but his speech halted along its way.

“How could he have horns… he is a man like us!” said Lojzka, annoyed. Then she thought for a moment, and added: “But he does not have a soul!”

After long deliberation, Tonček asked:

“But what happens when a man falls in the army. Is it like this, on his back?”

He showed them how a man falls on his back.

“They beat him… until he is dead,” Matijče explained calmly.

“But father promised he would bring me back his gun!”

“And how will he bring it, if he fell?” Lojzka reproached him.