from My Dear You

Jasna Jasna Žmak

Illustration by Yeow Su Xian

400,000

I read recently, in an essay by Barthes, an anecdote about a tribe that deletes one word from their language every time one of its members dies, putting the word out of circulation as an act of remembrance. I imagined the members of that tribe to be like walking dictionaries, and the idea that pieces of language disappeared with their lives, that the dead are remembered through words that no longer exist, was terribly romantic.

I thought about how nice it would be if we did something like that—not we, Croats, but we, speakers of the Croatian language. And not just us, but all the other speakers of all the other languages of the world. I thought about how maybe we would become more careful with words if we knew that each of us carried within ourselves one word from that little language of ours, a word that would disappear with that language and which no one would ever be able to say or write any longer. If we knew that every word represented an entire life, then maybe we’d think twice before we said it, before we wrote it.

But a single, simple calculation was enough to frighten me. Specifically, I calculated (with a bit of web surfing) that, if we approached things this way, it would take less than ten years for every single word to disappear from the Croatian language. The math was quite simple: there are around four hundred thousand words in our language, and around fifty thousand of us die each year. In eight years, those remaining would be left speechless, I realized, and I became terrified. Although there’s often plenty of words, and more often than not there are too many for me, I still don’t want them to disappear forever; I still want them and, moreover, I want them with me.

Your arithmetic is stupid. Where did you even read that the Croatian language has four hundred thousand words? you asked me when I brought my theory to you. I admitted that perhaps the newspaper Jutarnji list was not the most reliable source on questions of language. And didn’t it occur to you that over 90% of people would already be left without words, if there are only four hundred thousand words, and four million of us? you asked me, and I was embarrassed that I hadn’t figured that out myself.

Even though it sometimes seems that way, Croatia isn’t a tribal country, and the size of our population significantly exceeds the breadth of our vocabulary. Even though I was already discouraged, you continued carrying out your mathematical operations. But all is not lost, you cried out. Add slang, dialects, anglicisms, personal names, nicknames, add toponyms, all those words I’ve made up, and, of course, add Serbo-Croatian, and the number of words will be much, much larger, you told me, and then I breathed a sigh of relief, because it turned out that I’d actually calculated everything all wrong; it turned out that maybe there was still a chance for my pipe dreams.

And while I was trying to construct a new equation in my head to test how long Croatian could hold out under these new circumstances, a better idea occurred to you. Wouldn’t it be much better if, once words were wiped out, one new word appeared with every newborn? you asked me, and I couldn’t help but agree. Yes, I realized, it would be even more romantic if every baby came with one new word and if, with each person, language was born anew, too. Words would be reincarnated and there would always be enough of them in circulation; we’d never be left without them.

This time, however, you were the one to say, But words would still disappear, remembering that the death rate in Croatia has outpaced the birth rate for years, meaning that, even though our supply of words is much, much larger, in a few decades, a century at most, we’d still be left without any words.

Then we both mulled over the misfortune of words and the misfortune of the Croatian language, even though we know very well that there’s not a single language, except the one in Barthes’s essay, that won’t end up that way, that all this was just my crazy idea inspired by the practices of a tribe that has most likely already disappeared, if it ever existed, along with all of its words. At that moment, I realized that the idea wasn’t very romantic. I realized that I wouldn’t want even a single word to disappear from the world, not even from the list of words I hate, not even superlatives. I think that it’s good if all of the words I don’t like continue to exist, because if anything will save us from calamity, it’s words.

You finished my internal monologue by saying that you liked the final scene from Fahrenheit 451 much better than Barthes’s essay, and I immediately began to think which book I would be, if I could choose, happy that not just one but endlessly many words would live with me and within me.

translated from the Croatian by Samantha Farmer

Read the original in Croatian

Listen to the original read by the author:

In a sea of serious-minded Balkan fiction transfixed by the twentieth century, Jasna Jasna Žmak’s 2015 debut Moja ti (My Dear You) is a breath of fresh air and a sorely needed spot of lightness to balance ubiquitous narratives of queer trauma in contemporary literature. But as they enter the labyrinth of discourses between the narrator and her lover (the eponymous “dear you”), readers are unmoored from a linear narrative. Metafictional maneuvering surfaces and the seemingly stable borders of the Croatian language are blurred by anglicisms, imagined words, the Cyrillic alphabet, and even performative, drag-like usage of grammatical gender, which, to paraphrase Judith Butler, is always already gender and sex. I was attracted to My Dear You, whose queerness is teasingly never arrested in the form of a direct enunciation, for its breezy romance and knotty linguistic experimentation with the Croatian language. Its brief vignettes and conversational style conceal—like a Trojan horse—how difficult it is to translate, at least into English, grammatical gender or other features (like the mixing of Cyrillic script and Ekavian dialect with Latin and Ijekavian) that affect the texture of the original in a meaningful way, but are otherwise erased in translation. For the narrator, these games smuggle language away from its prescriptivist misuse in service of nationalist purposes. In fact, Žmak’s work predates the Declaration on the Common Language—which opposed the fragmentation of Serbo-Croatian into four national languages after Yugoslavia’s dissolution—by two years.

“400,000” is representative of the collection in its tone, pop culture literacy, and the push and pull of langue and parole. The conceit is simple: what if one word was lost every time a speaker of a language dies? Žmak short-circuits the false homology between “we, Croats” and “we, speakers of the Croatian language” (“ne mi Hrvati, nego mi govornici hrvatskog jezika”), but still manages to find significant attachment to the language one speaks as a relationship of coexistence, not ownership. However, the inevitable result of this subtractive mourning—to be without words—is too much to bear. The story ends on a hopeful note as the narrator decides that, like Ray Bradbury’s “Book People,” she would rather keep language alive and close by her side. I hope the reader in English will enjoy reading this story the way I have as a translator: read aloud, to their own “dear you.”

Jasna Jasna Žmak is a writer and dramaturg from Zagreb, Croatia. She teaches performance dramaturgy at the Academy of Dramatic Art of the University of Zagreb. She has published a book of prose, Moja ti (My Dear You; Profil, 2015), and a book of essays, One stvari: eseji o ženskoj seksualnosti (Dirty Words: Essays on Female Sexuality; Fraktura, 2020), among other dramatic and academic works. Her works have been translated into English, Polish, Slovenian, and Macedonian, and published widely in regional magazines and short story collections. She loves playing around with language and believes intersectional feminism is the future.

Samantha Farmer is a translator from Austin, Texas. They are currently a doctoral student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan focusing on the intersections of Balkan and American literature, critical pedagogy, translation, queer studies, and librarianship. Their translations have been or will be published in TROIKA and Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (forthcoming from Academic Studies Press in 2022).