Hemingway’s Trail of the Novel A Farewell to Arms by Branko Drekonja and Aleksander Jankovič Potočnik, trans. by Aleksander Jankovič Potočnik (review)

Readings of A Farewell to Arms—if not of all narrative—are, to a degree, guilty of ethnocentrism. Commentators on A Farewell to Arms have overwhelmingly been American, English, or occasionally Italian. What an exhilarating contribution, then, for Branko Drekonja and Aleksander Jankovič Potočnik to offer a Slovenian perspective on the novel, pointing out that Frederic Henry’s travels and travails with his ambulance unit are neither on Austrian nor Italian soil, but rather in current-day Slovenia. Hemingway’s use of the Italian names of the locations on the Italian front—Caporetto, Isonzo, Carso, Gorizia—lulls us so that, as the writers state, “hardly anybody realizes that the story takes place on what is now Slovenian soil,” which they proudly claim is “the very first time an important literary work chose what is now Slovenian soil as the setting for its story.” The vitality of an ever-expanding Hemingway studies depends on its inclusion of previously unheard voices from unexpected parts. Hemingway’s Trail is an English translation of the original in Slovenian, executed by Potočnik himself. The text is supplemented with over one hundred photographs, both historical (from World War I and before), and from the present day, including frequent side-by-side comparisons of particular sites then and now.

The title of this project—Hemingway’s Trail—turns out to be a misnomer. The suggestion that Hemingway himself traipsed through the Bainsizza Plateau and Slovenian hillsides is rapidly dismissed, although Drekonja and Potočnik reference another writer’s insistence that Hemingway did pass through Slovenia during his ill-fated 1927 return to la patria. Instead, the writers decide to track not Hemingway’s trail through Slovenia, but Frederic’s, as narrated in A Farewell to Arms. Modifying their objective in this way, Drekonja and Potočnik endeavor to follow Frederic’s ambulance route and his other forays to Plava, Kanal, and Bainsizza and various villages in between, using Hemingway’s description of landscape and setting as their guide.

Such a project devoted to a war-torn country based on a novel written eighty-five years ago and set one hundred years ago is bound to be full of obstacles. Hemingway’s Trail becomes Drekonja and Potočnik’s trail as they chronicle their false starts, dead ends, detours, epiphanies, confusion, and serendipitous encounters. They write charmingly, lovingly, and knowingly about their native soil and its relation to Hemingway’s text. Their love of the quest is infectious. Their pride in Slovenia’s association with A Farewell to Arms is moving. Although it may not matter to every reader whether Hemingway took the left path or the right path through a particular hamlet, it does matter to the reader that it matters so much to the writers. One of the photographs towards the end of Hemingway’s Trail captures Drekonja and Potočnik collaborating, their materials spread over a table in Slovenia, discussing Hemingway’s text and their notes under a bare light. And that is the value of this book—two Slovenians were sufficiently inspired by the presence of a great American writer on their native ground to pursue his protagonist’s long faded footprints. Hemingway’s Trail, then, is a book about their book, a story about their research; it would have been a compelling documentary. Perhaps it still could be.

Hemingway’s Trail does not negotiate previous Hemingway criticism, nor does it explicate A Farewell to Arms, beyond including relevant excerpts. Drekonja and Potočnik do expertly weave together the region’s complicated history with its geography, interpolating Hemingway’s novel where necessary. In the second half of this book, after Frederic’s trail has dried up, A Farewell to...