Nadahnuće                             Croatian

Anto Knezevic	In old Croatian texts that go back to the 15th century, nadahnuće usually denotes inspiration and sometimes instinct.  It refers to inspiration by God, devil, humans, or even inanimate things such as natural scenes, events, pieces of arts, and ideas. Things usually described as inspiring include music, speeches, paintings, and people in love.
The root of nadahnuće is dah “breath” while na is a prefix/preposition meaning “on,” not “in” (u would be “in”).  The prefix is what differentiates the Croatian word from its Russian and English counterparts containing prefixes denoting “in-” (вдохновение and inspiration, respectively). The verb nadahnuti means “to inspire, to breathe on(to)” and udahnuti “to breathe in, to inhale.” The adjective nadahnut is a passive for “inspired.” The ending –je in nadahnuće (older form: nadahnutje) marks neuter nouns. Related words include: uzdah “sigh”; predah “short pause”; zadah “bad breath”; dahtati “to pant, gasp”; izdahnuti “to release the last breath, exhale, expire, die”; odahnuti “to be relieved”; disati “to breathe”; duh “spirit” (“The Spirit of Inspiration” would be Duh nadahnuća); duša “soul.”
As a Bosnian Croat by origin, I have adopted two cultural traditions, Bosnian and Croatian. For many centuries Bosnia-Herzegovina was a unique multiethnic and multi-religious country in Europe. Bosnian identity includes four distinct and interrelated elements: Bosniakism (rooted in tolerant Sunni Islam), Croatianness (based on Roman Catholicism), Serbianism (traditionally Orthodox Christian), and Jewishness. Bosniak poet Mak Dizdar wrote a very inspiring poem about the unique country, Zapis o zemlji. Here I offer my translation of his poem into English.			Inscription About a Land by Mak Dizdar   Thus once upon a time a brave questioner asked                 a man: Well, pardon me, who is that one Where is that one Whence is that one Which path is That Bosnia Tell me   And then the questioned man gave him the urgent response: There is, pardon me, a land of Bosnia She is, pardon me, both barren and barefoot Both cold and hungry And moreover Pardon me Defiant Because Of a dream
When I see the color picture of the local Bosnian villagers, both men and women, sitting at a long table outside, under and around green trees, talking to each other, with smiles on their faces, with food and beverages on the table - then I feel that life in “cold and hungry” Bosnia is just one side of the truth, that there is the other, vital, inspiring, happy side as well.
The sun-lit side of the green, fruitful, peaceful land. I would like to be there, inspired by both the positive energy radiating from the picture and beautiful memories of many a feast in my native land. Last but not the least: My mother and my sister are shown on the photograph. Both of them are beautiful.

Interview Questions

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Edwin: You mentioned that nadahnuće means to breathe on. The older sense of inspiration in English is the same. That is the outside force or spirit breaths onto you. One text that I read was that the musician inspired the flute. That is breathed into the flute. People now think inspiration is you breathing in the inspiration, like taking a breath. This is a different concept, one is an outside force inspiring you without any effort on your own, the other is you exerting effort to take in the inspiration. Sounds like Croatian does not have this confusion. It looks like inspiration has the same relationship to breath in Croatian as the English word.

Anto: Yes, you are right: inspiration has the identical relationship to breath in Croatian as the English word.

What word do speakers in rural areas use?

As a rule, rural speakers use whole phrases for, or descriptions of, abstract terms. For example, villagers (not only in Croatia or Bosnia but throughout the Slavic-speaking countries) do not use the expression for being (e.g., “human being” or “being” as synonym for “existence”); instead, they would say creature. (Even the Slavic equivalent for creature came from the Church texts/sermons, not from the rural environment!)

Now back to the point. Let’s suppose that a Catholic priest gave a very inspiring speech in his Sunday Catholic mass. When parishioners come home they would praise his sermon but they would not use the adjective “inspiring.” It simply does not exist in their language. In a similar way, the average Americans do not use some words belonging to quantum physics (even though they may have heard those words). So the parishioners would simply say, “The priest gave a very good / excellent sermon.” Of course, well-educated villagers (and they are rare in villages) would and could use the adjective “inspiring” in the urban environment or in conversations with other well-educated people.

Where does the word nadahnuće come from? I.E. How far can you trace dah back in time? For example inspiration has been traced back to the Latin word spirare.

INTRODUCTION. Croatian is one of some fifteen Slavic languages. Others include Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian (very close to Croatian), Macedonian, Bulgarian, etc. Most of abstract terms in the Slavic languages come from the Old Church Slavonic language (OCS). It all started in the middle of the 9th century. At that time two Greek brother, St. Cyril and Methodius, lived in the city of Salonica. Since some Slavic (Macedonian) tribes lived around the city, the well-educated brothers learned the local Slavic dialect. When a Moravian prince (territory of today’s Slovakia and Bohemia) asked the Byzantine Emperor to send Christian missionaries to Christianize the pagan and illiterate Slavic tribes, the Emperor chose Cyril and Methodius. The brothers did several things.

• They created the first Slavic alphabet, Glagolitic, and their disciples the second - Cyrillic (named after Cyril).

• They codified the first literary language of the Slavs – Old Church Slavonic language (OCS).

• They baptized the Moravian Slavs.

• They translated some theological, literary, philosophical, and legal texts from Greek into OCS.

Thus first abstract Slavic terms were born and recorded. OCS was used predominantly in the (then united) Church. OCS is a protobasis of the modern Slavic languages in the way Latin is the basis of modern Romance languages. OCS was used for many centuries throughout the Slavic world (except Slovenia and Slavic regions in today’s Germany). Local (dialectal) versions of OCS would become individual Slavic languages after the Middle Ages.

Now back to your question. The Croats have been multiscriptal for centuries; they used Glagolitic, Cyrillic, Arabic, Gothic, and Roman alphabet (the last one has been predominant since late Middle Ages).

Dah “breath” and duh “spirit” have their roots in OCS. The Croatian word nadahnuće was recorded as early as the fifteenth century. Unlike many other abstract words made after their Greek models, nadahnuće was “coined” after its Latin counterpart (inspiratio) because the Croats are mainly Roman Catholic (unlike Serbs, Russians, and Bulgarians). Nadahnuće comes from theological and literary sources, not from everyday, ordinary life.
 

Is there any more native Slavic word that comes close to the meaning of inspiration? German also uses the word inspiration from the Latin. There is a more Germanic word with call Eingebung that has some of the qualities of the word inspiration. I was wondering if the same is true in Slavic?

Following my native speaker’s language instinct, I would say that there is a word close to the meaning of inspiration. That word is polet (equivalent to the French élan). The Croatian word’s root is the noun let “flight” (letjeti “to fly”). The polet’s connotations include “activity, motivation, inner energy, inspiration.” In a technical sense, the verb poletjeti means “to start flying (a bird); to take off (airplane)”; sletjeti is “to end flying (a bird); to land (airplane).” When one is very active, too busy, and has to be at various places in a short period of time people use the reflective verb razletjeti se (literally, “to fly oneself in various directions”).

Could you tell me more about your feelings related to the poem by Mak Dizdar?

The original poem is written in an archaic, medieval language. (I could add some archaic flavor to my translation by adding some archaic English forms.) According to many Bosnians, Dizdar is one of the best poets in the country. His words are full of historical memories, language beauty, and wisdom. Dizdar was inspired by inscriptions on some Bosnian medieval tombstones. The inscriptions contain(ed) some pre-Christian symbols (the sun, moon, stars...) and epitaphs. The short epitaphs speak about the lives of the deceased persons, their sufferings, and search for love. There is a widespread legend about the following Bosnian epitaph: I was what thou art; Thou willt be what I am. The strongest feeling caused by Dizdar’s poem about Bosnia is a profound and joyful insight that Bosnia will survive and blossom, regardless of the recent conflicts. It’s a land of dreams and real-life feasts (please see Answer 5).

Also, are there any images (paintings) that come to mind that express nadahnuće?

I was thinking about a color photograph from Bosnia showing a group of local people eating, drinking, and enjoying their conversations. I would call it “Feast.” Other pictorial associations are possible as well.

When you read the poem by Mak Dizdar, what are the actual physical sensations that you feel?

On  the one hand, some archaic or unusual words (for “questioner,” “who,” “tell [me]”) create the impression that some calm, ancient wise man is speaking to me (the reader). A series of four questions (who, where, whence, which path) creates a high tension and high expectations, on the other. The reader wants to know the answers to the questions ASAP. This is a search for truth. Only at the end of the first part of the poem the reader realizes that the subject matter of all those questions is not alive (it’s not who but what: a land that was personified). Even after this realization, the magic continues. In the second part, the land is described with adjectives that are applicable to both a land and living beings: It/she is spiteful/defiant because of a dream. The last words release the accumulated tension and meet the reader’s expectations. The reader is at peace.

What did you feel the first time you read the poem?

First I felt a rising tension and then relaxation. The key word in the title, zemlja, has five meanings: “land,” “country,” “ground,” “soil,” and “Earth.”  Thus it appears simultaneously as the life-giving “Mother Earth” and the final destination of human bodies – “dust.” The first part of the poem listed some of the most important secrets of life. The second part reveals those secret. When I read the poem the first time I just felt I could say, “Yes, that’s it.” I had intuitively known the answers to those four questions even before I read the poem (perhaps that’s why those questions are written without question marks?). It was like a bittersweet esoteric initiation into the secrets I had already been aware of. That’s it. That is Bosnia. And a feeling of happiness because of the way Bosnia did, does, and will exist. Tranquility.

You said about the poem by Dizdar, “The strongest feeling caused by Dizdar’s poem about Bosnia is a profound and joyful insight that Bosnia will survive and blossom, regardless of the recent conflicts. It’s a land of dreams and real-life feasts.” Would you say the poem inspires pride and hope in you?

Yes, absolutely. The poem was written (and experienced) before the 1990’s conflicts. It (has) contained a pan-temporal insight (wisdom) about Bosnia: both her suffering (hunger, coldness) and her vitality (dream-caused defiance). (Some of Dizdar’s poems were composed and sung by Bosnian singers.)

 I don’t understand the relationship of real-life feasts to inspiration? Could you explain that?

When I see the color picture of the local Bosnian villagers, both men and women, sitting at a long table outside, under and around green trees, talking to each other, with smiles on their faces, with foods and beverages on the table - then I feel that life in “cold and hungry” Bosnia is just one side of the truth, that there is the other, vital, inspiring, happy side as well. The sun-lit side of the green, fruitful, peaceful land. I would like to be there, inspired by both the positive energy radiating from the picture and beautiful memories of many a feast in my native land. Last but not the least: my mother and my sister are shown on the photograph. Both of them are beautiful.

Nadahnuće is Croatian, but you talk about the Bosnian villagers.  What is the relation of Croatian and Bosnian language?

This relation is a complex issue and various native speakers may give various answers to it. To make a long story short: I was born in a family of Bosnian Croats. (The other two large Bosnian Slav communities are Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Sunni Muslims.) The members of my ethnic group are Roman Catholic. They use the Croatian Latinic alphabet, some specific vocabulary, and call their language Croatian. Other Bosnians (Serbs, and even some Muslims) use the Cyrillic as their predominant or the second alphabet. There are more sociolinguistic than linguistic differences between Croatian and Bosnian. One of the linguistic differences is that Bosnian contains more Oriental (Arabic, Persian, and Turkish) words and international expressions while Croatian is more purist, Slavic-rooted language. On the sociolinguistic level, it is an important fact that most countries in the world have not recognized the existence of the Bosnian language.

From your articles introduction, where did you hear about the devil inspiring people?

“The Dictionary of the Croatian or Serbian Language” mentions inspiration by devil as one of the meanings of the word nadahnuće and gives four explicit examples (plus one implicit example) from four different (religious and literary) sources. One of the The Dictionary’s descriptions reads (here I offer my English translation of the quoation): “To inspire (nadahnuti), in a more or less metaphorical* sense, signifies some mental action; it is used mainly as inspiration by God, rarer by devil, and still rarer by someone (or something) else.” [ * metaphorical = nonliteral; note by A.K.] Here are the examples cited by the Dictionary (translated into English):

(i) “As the devil inspired them, so they did it.”

(ii) “The evil and devil-inspired woman said.”

(iii) “Inspired by the devil she began thinking of how she could kill her.”

(iv) “After the devil’s inspiration, he was thinking how to refuse the monk.”

(v) “O, my God, who had inspired the evil men so that they betrayed the king?”

“Inspiritation reminds me of the Lakota word for inspiration. It is Nag’i ksapa and means Wise to the Spirit. The emphasis is not on the spirit coming into to you but of you opening up to an awareness of it. It gives me a sense that inspiration is always there and you only need remove blocks to see it. Or perhaps become wise to see it. This compares to having to wait for the spirit to blow its breath in you.”

Thanks for sharing the Lakota Indian word for inspiration (Nag’i ksapa). That description inspired me to verbalize my feeling of inspiration. I see inspiration as a moment when an outside source wakes up a dormant inner source of inspiration. A kind of matching between the external and internal matches (sparks). The external source in itself, and by itself, is not enough to trigger the inner sense of inspiration. Equally, the inner dormant, potential inspiration must have some outside object (at least in one’s memory) to put the inner motivation in motion and drive it to its highest levels.

If you were asking questions about inspiration, what questions would you ask?

I would ask the following questions:

1. Are inspiring events/moments/experiences repeatable? Why or Why not?

2. Could inspiration be taught?

3. Does a person experiencing happy (mutual, returned) love need any other source of inspiration?

4. A Latin proverb says, “DVM SPIRO SPERO” (I hope as/so long as I breathe). Can a person in despair be inspired?

5. Are there any common, underlying characteristics of “inspiration” in languages belonging to different typological groups?

6. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, where is the locus of inspiration (heart, the brain, mind...)?

7. Is inspiration analyzable without taking into consideration subconscious drives and instincts?

8. What are the cognitive and emotional relations between/among inspiration-related thoughts, feelings, words, actions, and memories?

You mentioned, “Other pictorial associations are possible as well.” Do any more pictures that come to mind which express the experience of nadahnuće to you?

Yes, there are some other pictures associated with nadahnuće. They include photos of clouds I took from an airplane and sunsets in Monterey, California. (I may send them to you.) However, they are not affectively bonded, or related, to Mak Dizdar’s poem of Bosnia. What distinguishes the Feast photo from other inspiration-related pictures is human presence, a feeling of warm and mild human presence. The clouds and sunsets express the beauty/grandeur of the nature and imply sublime human solitude that is, after all, just that - loneliness.

The Croatian National Corpus that will contain about 30 million contemporary Croatian words (available on the web) has recorded nadahnuće 147 times (frequency 0.001605 %) in the corpus so far. I’ve read all those 147 sentences/lines containing the word (a total of some 10 printed pages). I found three possibly interesting uses of the word:

1) In one case, nadahnuće appears in plural: “with the emotionally torn-apart tone and their incompleteness they express the inspirations from which they came into existence.”

2) In one case, “water” is connected with nadahnuće: “one should constantly pour water of inspiration from outside.”

3) In one case (irony), justice is associated with the word: “the judges still judge without the inspiration from the attorney’s lawsuits.”

I recently took a film making class and in the class we created short stories or skits and then made a short video of it. I had a lot of fun with imagining and creating a scene. The scene I created was of a depressed filmmaker in a Bar and the woman at the bar serving the drinks was to be a Muse and try to inspire him. The depressed filmmaker kept saying how miserable he was and the Muse kept saying, “It could be worse, look at the drunk at the other end of the bar, you’re better off than him.” I have been asking people to imagine a short scene which in some way tells something about inspiration. I was wondering if you have a short scene that spontaneously comes to mind?

Muse to the Filmmaker: “I am happy that I have met you. I see in yourself more than your current mood. I see your ability to create something meaningful and inspiring. You see that young boy over there? Yes, that drunk guy in the corner. His girlfriend has abandon him and he’s very unhappy. You can go over to him. Pay him a drink. Ask him to tell you his love story. Ask him for permission to write a screenplay based on his story. Offer him to play the main role in your new movie. The role is to play the role of himself. Offer him an opportunity to relive the entire drama of being loved and being abandoned. Offer him a chance to share his feelings with thousands of viewers who would and will empathize with him. Let all of them experience the depth and beauty of most profound human emotions. To your health and creativity! Cheers!”