I've actually been looking forward to September for as long as I can remember. I'm trying to understand it. First of all, under the summer heat, in August, time stretches out like a guitar tone in the slowest blues. Cities become empty. At noon, the squares look like the paintings of Đorđe de Kirik. An abundance of bright light and black shadows. Human buildings. Absence of people. September promises the end of that metaphysical immobility.
In the towns in the south, in front of the colorful storefronts, logs lie on the sidewalks. Firewood for the winter, domestically arranged. In the heat - August is not here yet - it looks like a harbinger of a distant ice age.
May autumn
Maybe it was hard for others to think about school after the holidays. Not to me. Repeated crowding into a herd called a class filled me with joy. It was no different during student days in Sarajevo and Belgrade.
I was happy to meet all those people with whom I breathed the same air at lectures and in student bars.
All this, of course, was bathed in the September sun, which could be merciless, but its August murderousness would gradually subside. Warm, not hot.
In German there is a saying that September - May is autumn. Of course, for one, the ninth month, unlike the fifth, which is the great spring promise of summer, marks the end of a favorite season, it is a hint of winter's death. For others, September promises the fruits of everything that man and nature started in the spring and cultivated through the summer.
In the poem "Autumn Day" Rajner Marija Rilke wrote in a recognizable tonality:
Lord: it's time. It was a great summer.
Cover the sunny timers with your shadow,
drive the wind into the corridors.
The ninth week
We tend to believe that the way we label the world around us and within ourselves has always been like that. But it didn't. Language is a living human plasma, it overflows and mixes with other languages, it changes its features, the accent moves over time like a drunken sailor on the deck of a ship.
The names of the months are of course no exception. For me, September is the only name I knew - until I started reading books in the western version of Serbo-Croatian. That calendar mark for a period of 30 days is connected with the sensory experience of the world. That name was imbued with iridescent colors. Those from the dominant August shade, which only the yolks of farm eggs have, turn into a lighter yellow. When someone says September, even today I see that bridge of light, at one end almost brownish-yellow like a field of ripe wheat, and at the other like an airy vanilla jelly. A bridge of light between summer and autumn.
When I started to analyze things intellectually - on the basis of knowledge dormant in books - I realized that the names of the months are not just semantic containers for our sensory experiences. Those names had meanings. And September actually had a story about its origin.
She goes like this. The ancient Romans were already masters of the entire Mediterranean and hinterland. Their year began with the month of March - named after Mars, the god of war. Therefore, the seventh month - in Latin septum - is named after its regular number in the year. Since 153 BC, Roman consuls no longer took office in March, but in January, so the beginning of the year was moved from the first of March to the first of January. September was no longer the seventh but the ninth month. But he kept the name.
Thus, the month that in our presentation is inextricably linked with the Arabic number nine, in its deepest historical layer is actually Seven.
September in the east
To make things even more complicated, in the eastern half of the empire - in the Roman Empire, which was later named Byzantium - a custom was adopted from the then Asia Minor province that the year begins - in September. The reason is simple. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, was born on September 23. The month of August was named after him as early as the eighth year of the Old Era. Luck did not touch you in September.
They actually did, but it didn't last. The Romans ran through several more attempts to rename September. First, they offered August's stepson and successor Tiberius to name the month after August after him. He refused with the remark - what will happen to the thirteenth Caesar? Caligula was less considerate, so he named September after his father - Germanicus, who became famous as a military leader in Germania. After the death of Claudius, the Germanic month became September again.
But the beginning of the year in September, and not in January, took root in the east of the Empire, and it was officially like that for more than a thousand years. After the fall of Byzantium, Russia continued to celebrate the new year at the beginning of September until 1700.
Perhaps something from those forgotten centuries lives as an invisible residue of history in my joy that awakens with the arrival of September. Because I don't see any of the other months of the year as a new beginning, even though it's actually the end of summer.
In the villages, autumn is more obvious, despite the climate changes. A breath of wind from the mountain caresses the cheek of the sleeper at night. Nature speaks a clearer language. In cities, vegetation pinned by concrete gives us less noticeable signs.
However, the wild apple on Julina brdo tells me that my favorite moon has wandered among the buildings. And I feel the same joy again. This was beautifully expressed by Erich Kestner in his poem "September": "And what seems to have passed begins".
From September to the harvest
South Slavic tribes brought their own names to the whole story about the ninth month. Perhaps we should recall the current situation. Despite the belief that only Croats have kept the older Slovenian names for the months - September is September - Belarusian also preserves the national name. In Belarusian, the ninth month is Verasenj. In Ukrainian - veresenj. And that translates to heather or heather, an evergreen bush from which brooms can be made. It blooms in the north of Europe in September. I assume that the Polish word for September - wrzešenj (wrzesień) - has the same root.
But it's different with the Czechs. Září has a much more concrete basis - mating time. Etymologists say that the Croatian September got its name from the verb "rjati", which means the announcement of deer and other animals starting their love game. September appeared to the Slavs as Cupid, who does all kinds of things to mammals.
Slovaks adopted the international name September, but the folk expression hruđenj (hrudeň) - which means chest, is also remembered. I can't really explain it, let your imagination run wild. In the past, September was also called Požnenc in the language of the Lusatian Serbs.
Our ancestors brought with them the name that is perhaps my favorite - grozdober. Or maybe they didn't? Grape harvesting was certainly not the main Slovenian activity somewhere beyond Transcarpathia. Anyway, the Slavs in the Mediterranean hinterland obviously knew how to name the period of the year when the grapes are loaded into the sepetes and unloaded into the tubs, when girls and women raise their skirts to crush the fruit with their feet.
The whole area of Zlatibor used to be called Rujno, after the bushes that turn red in autumn. It is called Ruj or Rujevina. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the old Slavic Serbian name for this month was September. And perhaps the roar of the deer sleeps in this word, because in September - as in many other things - the Croatian September is reflected in its relatives.
I don't know why, but in the song where the blonde hair of a girl is mentioned, I always imagined black manes. Dictionaries, however, tell us that the adjectives rus, reddish, riđ, ruben and rujan are synonyms. And the word September itself is explained as a sign for yellowish-red, reddish, ruddy. This does not apply to all regions. In the Leskovac basin, you will get a less ripe fruit if you ask for a September tomato at the market.
In Nenad Janković's book "Astronomy in the Traditions, Customs and Traditions of the Serbs", published by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1951, the following folk names for September were recorded: Rujen i Rujan, Vresen i Bresenj, Grozdober, Gruden, Miholjski, Miholjštak, Malogospođinski , "around the little Gospa", Bulgarian. The latter is actually the Mother of God.
Poetic September
Kurt Weill, composer of the music for Brecht's "Threepenny Opera", created the jazz standard "September song" in 1938. The gentle song is actually a reminder that we are transient and that there is no time for games when it comes to love. The first famous performer was Frank Sinatra.
However, when someone crosses September and music, I immediately think of the great Yugoslav band September, from the seventies. Jazz rock that led me to jazz. The homeland they sang about in 1979 no longer exists. But it remained a harmless love covered with a patina of melancholy, in a masterful musical connection.
It is interesting that the band recorded the album Domovino moja in the United States, during a tour.
One of the most important German poets of today, Durs Grinbein, published his "September Elegies" more than two decades ago. Their starting point is what happened in New York on the eleventh day of September 2001.
Serbian poets were not idle either. Miroslav Mika Antić started his song "Eyes" with the lines: "In every September there is something like a silent parting". At the end of the four-part poem, the poet says that even dreams should be seen as they "grow into a wonderful universe/ that we invented for ourselves in the heights of fallen September".
The inimitable Stevan Raičković sharpens a linguistic diamond in the song "September". The song has only six lines. Football players would say - dribbling on a five-pointer:
Let's stop, song.
Did we live, did we?
You are the most beautiful honey
- Apple trees when they turn golden,
In a light fog, penny -
She took away a sad me.
Bonus video:
