THE LANGUAGE WHERE I LIVE
by IRINA M. CAVAION
This issue is dedicated to Love, that is, we have been called to write about love.
This led me to reflect (grateful, therefore, to the editorial staff!) that, in the exciting task, which is also a journey, of bringing to the pages of this magazine contributions that bind and untie land-language-people, that open up to new visions in which languages — one’s own, those of others — become more and more protagonists of personal stories and less and less a topic of borders, language policies, bureaucracies, there is a discourse of love at the base. Love for people and love for languages.
So, in thinking about what and who could so emblematically represent a love discourse on and through the multilingualism of this region, it led me to remember Antonella Bukovaz, poet and writer, and friend, who through an extra-ordinary expressiveness made love an infinite game of images, which in truth are listened to, which become a complex and refined game of sounds between (her) languages.
Antonella who was born and grew up alternating, intertwining, sometimes unraveling Italian, Slovenian, Nediško, and then bringing together her languages in compositions, sometimes poetic, sometimes narrative, which challenge geographical boundaries and linguistic categories.
I thought of Antonella, therefore, to talk about love and languages.
To help build and inspire a feeling of multilingualism, as well as thinking about it, wanting it, planning it. A multilingualism close to and within people, their stories, their voices.
A more synesthetic multilingualism.
A multilingualism… in love.
Antonella, you write in Italian, speak and teach in Slovenian but the language you grew up in is Nediško, the dialect of the Natisone Valleys – which of these languages do you have a love affair with?
It is not an idyllic or pacified bond, but a deep love story with the nediško. The language of childhood, of the body, of the first perception of the world, of sound even before syntax. Mother tongue that lives in the belly, in song, in prayers, in the smells of the house… However, it is also the language of which I feel the limit and that I am never adequate enough to possess it completely or to give it a complete form on the page.
Italian has become my literary home, the language of architecture and real writing. Slovenian is the language of geography and teaching, my relationship with it is also difficult. But nediško remains that fundamental presence/absence, the primary falling in love. She is a cumbersome mother due to the weight of her origins, her history, the tangle of her nature, but she is also fragile and vulnerable because she is on the verge of extinction. From this jarring comes my sense of inadequacy: the feeling of never being able to give enough back to this boundless language, of not knowing it or being able to write it entirely, of betraying it by coming down from its embrace.
I have sorrowful poems that speak of her, full of blooms, bitterness and explosions and doubts and anxieties. My declarations of love lie in the small sound inlays of the dialect that emerge in my lyrics. I try to make that native sound vibrate within the other languages I inhabit, letting the love for the word remain open and vital, an imperfect gesture, never completely tamed.
At the same time, dear Irina, I feel a distance that arises from a painful modesty: the weight of not being able to consider that mother tongue sufficient for me, for my poetic research. What presumption, eh? At the same time I recognize that nediško is not enough for me to say everything that my poetry needs to say and it is not a betrayal, but a rather painful acknowledgment. My language of origin has its own form of fullness which, on the page, I feel as too narrow a perimeter compared to the vertigo of the world. I believe that it is the desire for abstraction and trespassing that moves me from a small language to a linguistic space in which to take risks and build in a hand-to-hand combat made up of Slavic sounds, echoes and resonances that continue to beat on the page. In Madame Bovary there is a moment in which Flaubert says: “No one, ever, can give the exact measure of what he thinks, of what he suffers, of the necessity that presses him, and the human word is often like a tin pot on which we go beating melodies that make bears dance while we would like to soften the stars.”
We have written to each other in these days. And I wrote, questioning ourselves: “Your words do not have and do not bring boundaries but intertwine. If they then speak of love…” you continue…
To this invitation of yours I add these verses of mine: “The border teaches you to stand still / and it doesn’t care about your nature / but it doesn’t care about it too / like two lovers who pretend not to love each other / they hold their position”. You propose issues on which I have been debating for some time and in truth I have no answers. Do words have boundaries? Do words intertwine? Do they know how to say love?
In the end I give up. I recognize that I am not interested in dissecting them or giving them a theoretical definition. It is enough for me to be exactly where all this happens: in the friction of the border, in the instability of the intertwining, in the imperfect attempts, in the crowding of languages and in the unpredictable matter of love that, yes, intertwines everything inside and outside of us! It is a position of listening, and also of resistance. In some way I hold the position. Poetry for me is not a tool to untie knots, but the place where I inhabit this suspension. I don’t know if words can really unite or express love, but I know that being in this doubt — with my whole body, with my tongues and with my unanswered questions — is the only way I know to make poetry. “And this language where I live is a rose garden / blossomed in a lost time / a secret alphabet that I stole from the light of the past / not a word but a boundless field and breath with a restless rhythm / this language where I live is a loved and hated void / inhabited by a forgotten love / a roar that runs that runs like a hamster”.
Linguistic boundaries and limits are often set “by others”. Those who ask you in which language you think and dream. Those who ask you to define a level of mastery. Those who look at you bewildered because they don’t understand in which language you are speaking and writing. Those who tell you “but which side are you on, what language are you..?”. How do you see and live the linguistic, expressive limits set by others? Do you have any advice…?
One wonders, dear Irina: should I always answer while remaining under the aegis of the sense of love or, ready to go, do we pull out the axes and slaughter ourselves?
Because these questions — “in what language do you dream?”, “which side are you on?”, “how well do you speak it?” — arise precisely from an anxiety of classification that has very little to do with love and is much more like a customs interrogation. There is always someone who needs to measure, delimit, verify the purity or fidelity of the writer, imposing a bureaucratic boundary where there is only living matter.
I live these limits and these boxes with a mixture of impatience and fatigue. To pretend that a person, a poet or anyone, must declare a monolithic belonging means ignoring that emotional and linguistic life is fluid, bastard, full of interference and gray areas. We are not a form to be filled out for the registry office.
The limits set by others are fences that serve to reassure those who build them, not those who are inside creation (I had to say a banality!). I am in and with sound, in voice, in waiting, and sometimes in wonder.
To the control of those who measure the levels of mastery, I prefer to oppose another loving way. I think of when, working on the project The Poetry of Dialects, I find myself with groups of elderly people in nursing homes translating poems into dialect. There, in front of people who have often lost everything, you clearly see that dialect is not a sociolinguistic category or folklore to be exhibited: it is their last home, an intimate and indestructible refuge that no one can ever take away from them. There, language does not ask for patents, it only asks to continue to resonate.
Advice? I don’t know. (Michela Murgia comes to mind who incites from the stage: “Disobey! Disobeyed!”) Perhaps a piece of advice is to always be wary of the guardians of linguistic purity and the air traffic controllers of identity. To those who live on the margins, to those who inhabit several languages or dialects, I would only say this: inhabit your shortcomings, your imperfections and your inlays without apologizing. You don’t have to show a mastery license to have the right to use the voice that inhabits you. Poetry serves exactly this: to dismantle the bars of these limits and to remind us that we are not called to define which side we are on, but to remain free in the unclassifiable. Because here “… nothing is intact anymore, I trade what remains to me for a small but exact act of love”.
Hvala, dredge Antonella. I didn’t know where we would end up, but… a nice gift for us and for the readers of Isonzo-Soča, this short conversation.
Antonella Bukovaz is originally from Topolò-Topolove, in the Natisone Valleys. Poet and artist, her research has always moved along a performative tension, with constant attention to the care of the voice and the interweaving of text, sound, body and action. Her multilingual experience also crosses school, working with young people and listening to the elderly: she was one of the founders of the Slovenian-Italian bilingual school of San Pietro al Natisone, conducts creative writing workshops for young people and develops intergenerational poetry projects in retirement homes.
He has published Tattoos (Lietocolle, 2006), al Limite (Le Lettere, 2011), Nuovi poeti italiani 6 (Einaudi, 2012), koordinate (2012) and Guarda (2015) for the editions Pulcinoelefante, 3X3 parole per il teatro_3X3 besede za teater (ZTT-EST, 2016), casadolcecasa_domljubidom (Miraggi, 2021), Compagnevole animale (B#S edizioni, 2022), La pietra e il prato (Samuele editore, 2026). He is present in the anthologies: Nuovi poeti italiani 6 (Einaudi, 2012), Il Friuli dei poeti edited by G.M. Villalta (Storie, 2024), Antologia di RicercaBo (Manni, 2024), Una mappa poetica del confine (Fondazione PnLegge, 2025), Exit poetry. Future Poetry (La nave di Teseo, 2026). For the sound theatre Hanna’s Atelje Sonoričnih umetnosti in Ljubljana he wrote and performed the operas S.E.N.C.E (2010), Sonokalipsa (2013) and Pavana za Antigono (2014).
In 2025 he edited The poetry of dialects and the landscape of images (GO!2025). From 1994 to 2022 he collaborated in the creation of Topolò-Postaja Topolove Station. He is currently president of the Stazioni_Postaje aps.
His YouTube channel is https://www.youtube.com/@poesia-bukovaz
Canto per Linguesconfinate (al Limite, Le Lettere, Florence 2011)
Oggi (just for one day)
You could play at thinking that the language
Danes (Just for One Day)
You could play at thinking that the language
allows explorations
that have nothing to do with thought
materializes
In a wind that shifts the observation planes
and produce the gesture that makes the horizon disappear.
I speak from the edge and only it understands me
those who retreat to give space
to the breathing of distance
between one language and another
composing itself in the sound that remains
As I stick my finger in the dirt
I stick my finger between one stone and another
and I speak from this co-presence
in which I always look for the lost word.
Dress the sweat of my thoughts
Slides in rivulets from the dome of the mind
Dripping into my mouth
you take the shape of it
like a time that marks
and the air it occupies.
I speak from the top in me razume samo
who deserts the imaginary line
and enjoys incomprehensible sounds.
I speak from the bottom where the bitterness is and the throat begins
And Slavic sounds make up the world
that barely consoles me.
I crossed you to betray you
You licked your lips as I passed by
If I could have the rhythm of the undertow
You’d be pebble tongue
And we’d go mixed with the sea
but it is this staying… staying… staying…
that drives me away.
The dawn must keep me aside
and don’t lose sight of me
It will be easy in a chorus of a few thousand
You must have the help of the river
and the carousel of owls
Let’s hope he doesn’t notice the short echo
of this deaf tongue cut into slices.
Zora Oriental Light
Lighten the sound body
of this sorrowful mother of mine
she has the gait of a haughty commoner
Motherkeeper that resonates
in a scent of lime trees.
lahko noč… lahka naj ti bo noč….
to poznaš? to pot poznaš?
lahko noč… lahka naj ti bo noč….
to poznaš? to pot poznaš?
Identity chains you as the water rises to your throat
but here they are all too too respectable
to cling to or make a lifeboat
to scatter you like seed.
If I were a knight in love and you my damsel
I’d kidnap you and take you away and ask you to sing
I would like to hear you echo – translated language
bounced from other sides – from a new landscape.
If I were a restless traveler and you were my home
I would move you every time you leave
I’d like to see what’s lost
and what was thought lost reappears.
Si moja piham diham piham si moja
Medtem ko čakam da se odpre
Diham si moja medtem ko čakam
da se odpre piham si moja
Ko čakam tvoj veter
Diham si moja medtem ko čakam
Čakam si moja
da se odpre tvoj veter.
And who among my friends still speaks to you nimbly?
They pull the strings to your fine linen stockings
Sticking them in with their raw tongue
Flaying your thin Slavic skin
caressing you with magpie legs.
Here they are – the short step
Flea trainers
think thoughts speak words
Everything as if it were always yesterday
and yesterday he had no children.
Voice Voice Voice
I need voice
with voice – sought
spoken – in the voice.
It was. Where? Tam! Tam!
Dajte mi glas glas glas
And now it’s late
and now it’s tomorrow.
Tam je blo
Tamle wings… to cuttings
kje? Persaripersa
never had, never owned.
Zgubila san se….
Sold out in living rooms
of the battle
on the step
of the mountain
lost sight of
removed
It’s that you never made me dance
in your kitchen
only rosaries and the smell of wet soot.
Saying how can I
Is it allowed?
Pusti me! Take your hands off me
I’m not like you
Ljuba
Blood is dripping on your shoes
ljuba
Let’s sit down for a moment
White
cleans up my verse
White
otherwise I lost.
I speak you
to you return
at every step
composes sound
among the rubble a sense.