A few weeks ago I had a few friends round for food, wine and not a little madness. It was a kind of celebration for Scotland’s national poet, the incomparable Robert Burns, and so we ate haggis, tatties, oatcakes, and good Scotch broth…or rather, my middle European versions of them. There are some things you just can’t get in this part of the world, such as a swede. (No, not tall blond athletic Scandinavians, who are actually ten a penny here, but a vegetable not totally unlike a turnip.) And so I had to improvise with certain strange Germanic fruits of the soil, some of which I still don’t know by name.
The nationalities that arrived included Australians, (they get everywhere, apart from quite possibly Australia), English, Austrian, a solo Scot, and four Bulgarians. Yes four…put it down to drunken revelry on a late night underground train with a particular birthday celebrating woman. Anyway, I sent the invitations by email a few weeks before, only to discover that one of the eastern European ladies was somewhat confused by the word haggis as she believed it might be, not to put too fine a point on it, a sexual disease. It seems an innocent request that she attend a ‘haggis bash’ meant ‘please come over for tantric sex on the rug while I transmit a strange illness to you by the warmth of a roaring fire’, or something along those lines.
It would appear that there is hardly a word in any language that doesn’t mean sex in Bulgarian. Cabbage for instance, a green thing that inspires fear in young children all over the planet, apart perhaps from areas near Munich where it is looked upon as the food of the gods, has some weird connection with the losing of virginity in provincial Plovdiv. ‘I must go eat the lord of all vegetables, the cabbage, and maybe nibble a few princely sprouts as well’, is seen as an invitation to have a wild time in the back garden, and I don’t mean digging up a few carrots and trimming the roses, although now you come to mention it…but no. Let’s just prune that particular subject at the roots! It’s interesting that the most popular occupation in that part of Europe is the growing of green vegetables. (Ok, this is obviously untrue…but it might just be accurate.)
Of course, confusion over words can be a major problem the world over, especially if you’re an American. Citizens of the good ole’ US of A speak in a tongue unlike almost any other language, and yet in some distant form it is related to English. No, not the English found in certain parts of the UK, but more a third cousin twice removed, washed and placed in a spin drier, beaten with sticks, painted a garish colour, mixed with glue, thrown from a tall building, and then blown into a million pieces by high explosives before being put back together by a three year old with her eyes closed, sort of English. I can almost understand my stateside friends who were raised in a major city across the pond, but if they come, for example, from Kansas or Oregon, I might as well be listening to an Eskimo speaking Russian whilst playing the bagpipes.
Leaving English to one side, there are nations who demand the right to speak numerous languages, for example the Swiss, who not content with one have three or possibly four, depending not only on where you were born, but also on which way the latest referendum has gone, India, a country with more languages then people, and China, where there are so many symbols in their alphabet that some are still being discovered as we speak. At the last count Mandarin had 4,598 letters, 76 colours, twenty two birds and a small tree, but that may have changed radically in the few seconds it has taken to write this.
And then there’s style: no, not expensive shoes, silly hats and man-bags, but how different nationalities actually carry out a conversation. Let’s take the French, who can make a request that you stand on the right hand side of an escalator sound romantic, but only if you use an umbrella while listening to protect yourself from the spray that erupts from their Gallic mouths. Or Italians, who flail their arms so much in conversation that the energy they produce, if harnessed, would solve the world’s electricity problems in a trice.
Now, I have to state here, quite unequivocally, that I am no expert on language. I can barely speak my own, and anyone unfortunate enough to be in one of my classes when I taught for a period in Vienna, will probably have less understanding of English than the average member of the ‘Eastenders’ script writing team. However, I think it unlikely that any nation in the world could have as many words with sexual connotations as Bulgarian seems to have. Unless you count Iceland, where the weather is so severe that every sentence includes an invitation to ‘sit by a volcano and examine each other’s glacial heights’, or certain parts of Germany, where the wearing of lederhosen has made sex such an impossibility that people are left to simply imagine what the act might be. It also probably explains Wagner and the Ring Cycle. (Well, something has to!)
Which brings us back to Bulgarian. Today, believe it or not, is Valentine’s Day, a day beloved of card, chocolate, and cuddly toy manufacturers the western world over. But not in the frozen wastes of the Balkans, where a short time after the villagers have completed the daily routine of potato counting and sheep measuring, the sleepy inhabitants will be in a state of high excitement for quite another reason. It is St. Triphon’s Day, the Day of Wine and Love, where every true citizen takes it upon himself, or herself of course, to rush to the cellars, drink of the vine and then find somebody to have a drunken fling with amongst the empty cabernet casks.
So, perhaps it’s not sex, but love, (with a little grape juice thrown in), that Bulgarian language and tradition bring to our party, for if we were all to honour St. Triphon on February 14th the world might just be a better place. On the other hand, why not celebrate and practice the fine arts of viticulture and the heart each minute of every hour instead of on a single grey day in mid-winter? I have to admit that I need much more practice in one of these skills than I do of the other, but I am loath to say which. Suffice to tell, the bottles are lined up in my cosy room. Would anyone care to join me? I even have my own bottle opener!
