Zvončki in trobentice

This is one of Slovenia’s happiest spring songs, and it opens like the season itself bursting into life: snowdrops and primroses, pussy willows and violets all pushing up from the earth at once, the grass greening, the forest waking, and the cuckoo calling its unmistakable ku-ku. It is a catalogue of everything that means winter is finally over.

The song plays delightedly on the names of its flowers. In Slovenian, zvončki (snowdrops) are “little bells” and trobentice (primroses) are “little trumpets”, so in the last verse the bell sings — cingu-lingu-lingulin — and the primrose trumpets tra-ra-ra, and the whole meadow becomes a little orchestra of spring. Its middle verses reach beyond the nursery: the time of love is in bloom, the young may love with all their heart, and the no-longer-young feel spring in their hearts too, which is why it is sung by grown-ups as fondly as by children.

It is not a folk song, though it is often taken for one. Both the words and the music are by Tone Roš, and Slovenian Wikipedia records its first release as a 1958 seven-inch single by Beti Jurković and Marjana Deržaj, with Miško Hočevar and the Ljubljana Jazz Ensemble. The text given here follows a song sheet that names Roš as author of words and melody; it differs in small ways from what many people sing today — zdaj pomlad je tu rather than saj pomlad je tu, cingu-lingu-lingulin rather than cingu cingu cingulin — and includes a verse about the time of love that is often left out. We could not establish Roš’s dates, so the song is treated as still in copyright.