Talk Time: Learn Croatian with a Cultural Twist by Tihana Klepač

Oliver Dragojević. 1978. Ča je život vengo fantažija.

That single word — ča instead of što — is the door into a whole world of Croatian that doesn't belong to Zagreb or any inland city. It belongs to the coast. To the stone and the sea and the way conversation slows down when there's nowhere else to be.

This week's Saturday Letter is about čakavski — the dialect of the Dalmatian islands, the Kvarner, and Istria. About the Venetian vocabulary that's been sitting in the mouth of every coastal speaker for four centuries without anyone noticing it arrived. About the oldest melody in Croatian, preserved on the islands while the interior changed. And about why this is almost always the dialect diaspora learners are reaching for, even when they don't yet have a name for it.

Link: https://open.substack.com/pub/talktimecroatian/p/cakavian-the-dialect-everyone-thinks?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7l683a

Free to read.

Vesna Parun. The last poem in the series. Because she is the right person to end with.
Bathe your sleepy eyes in dew, wash your forehead with the fire of stars. Do you love the night, or do you love me? Are you a well, are you an echo, that your eyelids are full of rain? And if you touched my waking branch, my heart would burst from the fullness. Press your ear close so my lips can whisper a word to you — like fruit.
A word like fruit. I have been thinking about that image for twenty years and I still cannot improve on it. Neither can English.
That is what this series has been about. The words that waited. The language that kept everything. The literature the world has not yet found.
It is here. It has always been here.

The Saturday Letter comes out every Saturday from Zagreb. Free. Link in bio.

There is a word in Croatian that I reach for when nothing else will do.
Ispočetka — from the beginning, all over again, back to the very first moment. English has from scratch, from square one. But none of them carry what ispočetka carries. Because ispočetka is not just a direction. It is a decision. A willingness to go all the way back and start again properly, without shortcuts.
I think about this word often. Because that is what my students are doing when they come to me. They are not picking up where they left off. They are beginning again — with everything they already know about the world, and with the language waiting exactly where they left it.
Ispočetka. It is never too late for it.

The Saturday Letter comes out every Saturday from Zagreb. Free. Link in bio.

Ivana Šojat is writing today, in Zagreb, in Croatian. Her prose is so precise it almost hurts.
It's hard, I tell her, though I don't know what I'd add to that. I can't define what exactly is hard. I think about how neither of us ever really dreamed much about marriage or children. When we talked about the future, it was only travel. And someone who would love us. When we were seventeen we dreamed of buying motorcycles, travelling Europe, visiting Jim Morrison's grave, going to the southernmost tip of Attica, seeing the foam from which Aphrodite was born.
I want to tell Jasna that I don't actually know why things are hard. Why I still feel like everything collapsed a few years ago. Like I've been sitting on the rubble ever since, clearing it badly, building nothing.
Contemporary Croatian literature exists. It is alive. It is this precise and this honest and this worth reading.

The Saturday Letter comes out every Saturday from Zagreb. Free. Link in bio.

Vjenceslav Novak. Born 1859 in Senj. Died 1905 in Zagreb. He wrote about the city, about poverty, about people who had nothing and kept their dignity anyway. Almost nobody outside Croatia knows his name.
Soft dense snowflakes fall quietly. It is four in the afternoon, winter shadows already reaching the ground, covering the wet pavement with white patches. The street is unpleasant with its mud and sharp damp. Everyone wants to be somewhere warm, in good company, in conversation without end. And yet — despite the snow and the cold damp — a man sits motionless on a bench in Ilica square.
Novak always begins where the cold is. And then he takes you inside.

The Saturday Letter comes out every Saturday from Zagreb. Free. Link in bio.

Dinko Šimunović. Born 1873 in Knin. He wrote about the Dalmatian hinterland and the people who lived in it — their silence, their endurance, the enormous things that happened inside ordinary lives.
They remembered that once, long ago in their youth, there had been a light inside them that burned and lifted them. But they put it out, little by little, because they thought they didn't need it. Because nobody else had it either. And now their soul was like that old abandoned fortress in the darkness.
Šimunović wrote about the Croatian interior — not the coast, not the islands, but the rocky, landlocked, unposted landscape that most of the world has never seen. It is some of the most quietly devastating prose in the language.

The Saturday Letter comes out every Saturday from Zagreb. Free. Link in bio.