How the things we give name to and express ourself visualizes our worldview and roots. Working on my book made me dig deeper into the history and origin of my both homecountries. I found out how the pagan and natureworshipping ideas was still practised subconsciously in Sweden, on the contrary to the Polish and Christian view. At some point I found and decided to translate a short story called by one of the most important writers in Swedish litterature, Sara Lidman. The story is very poetic, almost absurd and allegorical. Lidman remembers and descibes how the first love of her life was not a boy, but a tree. Before she attended school, she fell in love with a single spruce, that was growing in a forest near by her house. She visited the tree, and she prayed for it in the night, but as she started attending school
and became fascinated with words she understood that if she wanted to become human, she had to breakup the relationship with the tree, by doing so she fell in love with language instead, and all the possibilities of expression it gave her. As a contrast to this story my research made me discover a Polish magazine for teenagers from 1938. It was a very unstable time in Polish history, between two World Wars. The -T was issued by magazine entitled the Eucharistic Crusade in Cracow and used the concept of the forest as a patriotic propaganda. In a very ardent preface to the magazine, Polish youth could read that they are like trees, and their country is like a forest that is in threat of the foreign „downpour� and just like a single, lonely tree is incapable of stopping the heavly rains, a forest full of trees is strong. I