There is such a thing as tonal movement in a paragraph, and Jergovic’s are, I believe, distinctive. I cannot take a lot of time out of translating now because my deadline is looming, but here is a paragraph, actually three but the first two are a single sentence each, as an example of what I have dimly in mind.
But there was something else that linked the Stublers and the Seghers-Steins.
Mr. Maksim and Madam Danica would be Karlo’s children’s first music teachers.
She would be the person to teach them how to read music, such that before long all four children would be capable of deciphering any form of written notes. Thus, from the paper, would music be opened to them, and they would learn to hear it even without instruments, and Karlo, Regina, Olga, and Rudi would learn to play Mendelssohn, Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, and Bach, as well as the insane Schumann, who lost his senses in the span of one crazy carnival and leaped into a river to drown. Olga and Rudi had such strong imaginations that they could discern every instrument in the orchestrations, hearing even what was not in the notation: breaths of surprise, the public’s coughing, the heavy breathing of the old conductor, the noise of the street near the concert hall, the sounds of the epoch pouring across the paper notations like a sudden summer rain, melting the colors, and returning the brilliant music that no one would ever repeat again into the void. But then the electricity would go out, the bora would blow out the kerosene lamp, bringing on the darkness, and it was not possible to read anything anymore, besides fear, that of the young person and the child, before the life that had brought them together, which would afflict them and then tear them apart like the bombs in the summer of 1993, when they had all since died off, that fell on the courtyard of one of Sarajevo’s children’s shelters.
Russell Scott Valentino 