Daring Dreams of the Future

And the eye wandered through bright regions,

It dreamed daring dreams of the future,

Followed an orator’s powerful gestures,

And kept faith for a generation which is not yet born …

Oton Župančič, Duma

(translated by Henry R. Cooper, Jr.)

As with any translation, the team working on the English language version of this book found ourselves in front of a series of challenges that we had to solve to make it faithful to the Slovenian original, as well as reader-friendly for those interested in (Slovenian) migration who might not be deeply familiar with the Slovenian ethnic territory, its people, and its history.

The book is complex: it approaches Slovenian migration through historiography, literary studies, and sociology, so translating it at times felt like cramming for comprehensives in three academic fields. My first task as a translator was thus to find solutions that would work throughout the book, as not every field uses the same vocabulary to describe the same thing. The book covers almost a century, including World War I, with all the breaks in continuity and thinking that it brought. This fact required linguistic solutions that would make sense for 1839 as well as for 1939.

The first such choice was what to call people who moved, either within the state or internationally. We reserved the use of the more traditional terms of emigrant or immigrant for situations in which a person’s legal status is discussed, that is, when migrations are seen from the perspective of the country of origin and/or the receiving countries. When talking about the people themselves, we use migrants.

The territory and the identities of its inhabitants presented a further, and perhaps the most complex, challenge: what to call the territory that, over the span of a century, belonged to different states, not to mention its people, who lived under different regimes and adopted different identities, sometimes changing them, whether voluntarily or not? In the end, we decided on “Slovenian ethnic territory” to describe the regions that, throughout history, have had a contiguous Slovenian population. This territory has never been monolingual or monocultural; its inhabitants may have adopted different national or (particularly in earlier times) regional—as well as cultural and linguistic—identities, even within the same family and a single generation.

Some parts of this territory have long-established names in English, such as Carniola, Styria, or Carinthia, and we have used them throughout. Some parts do not; for those, we used current Slovenian names instead of their Italian or German “variants” or calques that sometimes appear in academic texts. We therefore use Prekmurje, Bela Krajina, Goriška, Primorska. Another deviation from the standard use is Benechia (the slightly anglicized version of Beneccia/Benečija). Such use may sometimes create unusual linguistic combinations, for example, when we discuss Styria and Prekmurje or Carniola and Goriška, but since administrative borders often cannot (and do not) correlate with the ethnic and/or linguistic borders, we felt such choices were perfectly justifiable.

At the beginning of the period covered, the Slovenian ethnic territory was a part of the Habsburg Empire and, at its end, a part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of Italy, and the interwar Kingdom of Hungary. Within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, it was divided between the Austrian and Hungarian parts, which we call Imperial Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, rather than the perhaps more traditional names Cisleithania and Transleithania. Slovenian-speaking inhabitants of the Slovenian ethnic territory are sometimes simply called Slovenians (particularly in the diaspora), even when discussing the time when regional identities were perhaps more prevalent. The text often refers to Yugoslavia or Yugoslav territories, even when speaking about the time before 1929. We did so consciously to make it easier to read.

Another segment that required a decision on what to translate (if at all) and how to translate it were the names of (diaspora) publications and organizations. Like other migrants, Slovenians organized in clubs and associations, published papers, magazines, and books, entered political alliances with like-minded people from their own and other communities. In different places, and in different times, they made different choices to name their papers, clubs, or parties. Sometimes, the names were in Slovenian only, sometimes they were bi- or multi-lingual. Often, associations and papers merged and combined, and consequently dropped parts of their names or invented new ones. We therefore had to decide which names to translate and which ones to leave in Slovenian only. It was not an easy decision to make—and it was even harder to stick to it. In general, anything that was bilingual in real life, is bilingual in the book. We added the English in parentheses after the Slovenian one if we felt it would benefit the reader: for the organizations active for a long time, or in a large area, for papers that were very influential or were published for a long time, for certain ad hoc political associations that were established around a vital cause. We were also more inclined to translate the names of those publications that have already been digitalized and are accessible to readers. We avoided translating the names of associations that were short-lived and papers that only had a couple of issues published and are difficult to access.

It is worth noting, too, that certain names repeat throughout the diaspora, regardless of the country they are in and the period in which they appear. They often included (a variant of) narod (nation), dom (home), zarja or zora (dawn), danica (morning star), delavec or proletarec (worker), zvon (bell), matica (center, base, or headquarters).

The names of cultural and social associations, in particular, often reflected their political orientation and the time in which they were created (frequently noticeable in the choice of words, such as jednota for unit or odbrana for defense). Cultural associations, especially drama clubs, were often named after the famous Slovenian playwright Ivan Cankar. Prosveta indicated that a particular organization took care of the community’s cultural and educational needs. More than one association was called Triglav, after Slovenia’s highest peak. Choral societies were often named after instruments or birds, with slavec—or the diminutive slavček, if it was for children—being a perennial favorite. And then there were certain associations whose names were never translated: Prosvetna matica and Glasbena matica are such examples.

Finally, a text of this length will always present a challenge for the translator.

I would like to thank the authors, Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, Janja Žitnik Serafin, and Aleksej Kalc, who patiently answered my incessant questions and worked with me through several drafts of the translation, friends—historians and linguists—whom I pestered to help me with tidbits about the countries and languages with which I am not particularly familiar, and all the librarians who helped me locate the sources that enabled me to make translation choices that would make the most sense for international readers. Professor Annemarie Steidl read an early draft of the translation; her comments on place names were invaluable, as were her comments on the parts of the text where the translation was not yet clear. Jana Renée Wilcoxen worked her editing magic to turn the final draft into a book, and using her fresh eye Ana Čavić made the final touches; it is difficult to explain just how much thought and work went into those two tasks. All mistakes that may have remained in the translation, of course, are mine.

The authors would like to thank the many colleagues who helped to bring this book to form through their time, insight, clarifications, and other contributions: Annemarie Steidl, Dirk Hoerder, Miha Zobec, Marina Lukšič Hacin, Majda Kodrič, Jernej Mlekuž, Danijel Grafenauer, Katalin Munda Hirnök, Attila Kovács, Matjaž Klemenčič, Žarko Lazarević, Aleksander Panjek, Mateja Rihtaršič, Deja Gliha, Tadej Turnšek, Oto Luthar, Martin Pogačar, Daniel Necas, Joseph Valencic, Marko Zajc, and Peter Vodopivec. Our deepest gratitude goes to Barbara Skubic for her translation, Jana Renée Wilcoxen for her copy editing, and Ana Čavić for her proofreading.

America is our problem: it has been our economic, social, national, cultural problem ever since our people started moving across the sea. Adamič claims this happened in 1870. For Bela Krajina, however, one must go at least twenty years back, the first among our men emigrated around 1850. I remember from my young age how, in every tavern, side by side with religious icons on glass and color prints of the “Stages of Human Life,” there were giant adverts for massive steamships with signs that said, “Red Star Line,” “Hamburg–Amerika Linie,” “Bremen–New York,” “Trst–Amerika.” People emigrated in droves, so more than one house was left without a master or even people altogether. Younglings at school dreamt about Bremen and Hamburg; New York, Chicago, Cleveland, Montana, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Dakota, Nebraska, California were familiar names, as they were where their fathers, older brothers, uncles toiled in mines, factories, saloons, and farms, and from where they “sent back” to pay off debts, to fix the house, to purchase a bit more, to pay taxes, to buy some treats. Many a thatched roof disappeared, and a log cabin turned into a brick house. My five aunts—because five were all the sisters that my mother had—were in America. When my father sold the house—to an American, of course—he took me, because I did well in fourth grade, to Bosnia with him so we could buy a house there. Had we indeed bought it, what would have become of my Slovenehood? Bela Krajina leans south. We didn’t buy it. My mother yearned to follow her sisters to America. Had she had her way—what would have become of me?

Oton Župančič (1932)

This is how Oton Župančič (1878–1949), the renowned Slovenian poet, playwright, translator, and influential editor of the literary magazine Ljubljanski zvon, reflected on mass emigration from the Slovenian ethnic territory, a phenomenon he had witnessed since childhood and which, at the time of writing these lines in the early 1930s, remained a burning societal and national question. From the mid-19th century until World War II, emigration shortchanged the demographic growth within the territory of today’s Slovenia by 440,000 inhabitants. We can only fathom the impact and general importance of this emigration once we remember that the entire territory we are discussing had a mere total of one and a half million inhabitants at the end of the aforementioned period. Migration processes, fueled mainly by economic constraints and social restructurings, were largely responsible for such a deficit. During and after World War I, the war and the newly created political circumstances, coupled with the existing economic and social causes and motivations, added to migration a character of evacuation and political exile. Slovenian Lands in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and, later, in interwar Yugoslavia topped all the lists of territories by the rate of emigration. They were also at the top in specific periods when considering the European continent.