En hud pesjan je živel

This is one of the odder corners of the Slovenian nursery — a darkly comic song in the old tradition of grisly tales told for laughs. A fierce ogre lives by eating people, cooking soup from them and picking them to the bone, until the day he catches something to cook that smells too strange and looks too hairy. The punchline of the middle verse is that his intended dinner is not a polecat, as you might guess, but the Devil himself — and the tables turn at once: the ogre topples into his own boiling cauldron, and the Devil gnaws him up and drinks the soup.

For all its cannibals and cauldrons, it plays as cartoonish comedy: the villain is out-monstered and served exactly what he had coming, and the whole thing ends on a mock-solemn moral — where two fiends meet, the beastlier one always wins.

It is not an old folk song, though it is often filed as one. It was sung, as Pesjanska, in Erazem in potepuh, the 1971 RTV Ljubljana children’s serial based on Astrid Lindgren’s Rasmus, where the actor Dare Ulaga performed it; the song was issued on a small record alongside Huda mravljica and Sirota Jerica from the same serial. The lyrics site Besedilo.si credits both the words and the music to Mirko Mahnič (1919–2018) — a theatre director, writer and for many years the language coach at the Ljubljana Drama — while the music is elsewhere attributed to Marijan Vodopivec, whose list of film and radio scores includes Pesjanska. The words, then, are Mahnič’s and the tune most likely Vodopivec’s. The folk-song site that prints the text names no author at all, and the song is sometimes miscredited to Janez Bitenc — we found nothing to support that. Its sly, unsqueamish humour is of a piece with the older children’s songs that were never expected to be entirely gentle.