Palček Smuk

This is not a song but a piece of narration — the atmospheric opening that so many Slovenian children remember by heart from the Palček Smuk cartoon. It sets a wonderfully spooky-cosy scene: behind fog thick enough to cut lies the pond Brbotalnik, perfectly ordinary by day, but once the pitch-black night falls, “strange things begin to happen”. Something bubbles in the puddle, something cracks in the reeds — and out comes Smuk, a restless little water-sprite, curious as a mouse, who roams and climbs until the first star appears in the sky.

Its Slovenian words are famous, but the cartoon behind them is not local: Palček Smuk is the Czechoslovak animated series Rákosníček, scripted by the writer Jaromír Kincl (1930–2019) and the screenwriter Vladimír Branislav (1935–2015) and directed by Zdeněk Smetana; the two series were made in 1976 and 1983 and first broadcast from 1977. The Slovenian narration is a translation of that scripted Czech text — its first line, “Za mlhou hustou tak, že by se dala krájet… je rybníček Brčálník”, is the fog and the pond of the Slovenian opening — and the translator’s name is not recorded in the sources retrieved for this page. The dub was lovingly done, with the actor Jurij Souček as its unforgettable narrator. Because so many Slovenian children grew up meeting Smuk each evening through this narration, it has earned its place among the songs and rhymes of their childhood — a reminder that a nation’s shared nursery memories are not always home-grown, but the ones that arrive from elsewhere and are made their own.