Hemingway in the Soča vally

Abstract

Hemingway is a very popular writer in Slovenia. One of my students in Ljubljana pointed out a very well known passage lin A Farewell to Arms about two refugee girls Frederic Henry and his driver, Aymo, pick up in Gorizia (Gorica) during the retreat from Caporetto (Kobarid). What interested many of my students about the episode was that the two girls seem to speak a dialect that neither Aymo, who is Italian, nor Frederic, who is fluent in Italian,' understands. My students belived that these girls are speaking Slovenian. The only Italian they seem to understand are the words in Italian for sexual intercourse, which makes them very upset, and virgin and sister, which calm them down. It is very likely that two Slovenian girls would know a little Italian, particularly if they came from Gorizia, which at the time of the first world war was predominantly Slovene.

Keywords

• American literature / Hemingway
• Ernest