Jaz sem mala miška

This is a song sung from mouse-height. A little mouse introduces herself — everyone knows her, she says — and shows off her home, an old house with exactly two holes. But each hole has its hazard: through the first the wind comes chasing, and at the second a black cat lies in wait. It is a small mouse’s-eye view of a world full of everyday dangers, told without a trace of fear, and it ends in a scurry: when the rain falls and everything is wet, off she goes on a long journey — škrap, škrap, škrap, the scratch of little feet as she darts in under the eaves.

The words are not anonymous. They are the poem “Miška” by Slavko Jug (1934–1997), a poet, translator, editor and journalist from Maribor, first published in his 1974 collection Nasmejane črke (“Smiling Letters”), reprinted in the picture book Počesane ribe (“Combed Fish”) in 2000, and reproduced on Slovenian Wikisource with his written permission under a Creative Commons licence. Singers often stretch the poem’s fourteen lines into three sung verses and repeat the last two lines as a refrain, and many say škrab rather than the printed škrap; the text here follows the published poem. The melody is by Albin Weingerl (1923–2010), a composer and choirmaster who after the war edited the children’s magazine Ciciban.