SOURCE: Holton, Milne, and Vasa D. Mihailovich. “Introduction: Vuk Stafanovic Karadžić and Songs of the Serbian People.” In Songs of the Serbian People: From the Collections of Vuk Karadžić, pp. 1-12. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Holton and Mihailovich provide an overview of Karadžić's work, with an emphasis on his collection of oral folksongs.]

The oral poems translated herein are taken from a single work of collection undertaken by one man, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864), a scholar and linguist living in the city of Vienna in the early years of the nineteenth century. He began his work in 1813, around the time of the collapse of the first Serbian insurrection against the Turks.

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was born in 1787 in the village of Tršić in Western Serbia, the son of a Serbian peasant. A sickly child, he was given the name Vuk (Wolf), supposedly to ward off evil spirits. As a youth he became involved in the service of the hajduk¹ rebels against the Turks and later in the first insurrection. Later he attended briefly the famous high school at Sremski Karlovci and then studied for a time at the new velika škola (later university) in Karadjordje's Belgrade. But he soon left Belgrade and, after an illness that left him crippled for life, went to Vienna in 1810. It was here that he met Jernej Kopitar, a Slovene scholar of some distinction who was then living in Vienna, where he occupied the post of official censor for Slavic literatures.

Kopitar was only three years older than Vuk but much more intellectually sophisticated, and he soon assumed the role of mentor. Both in his official capacity and as a result of his absorption of Herder's ideas of the importance of “popular”—as opposed to literary—cultures as the legitimate expression of national character, Kopitar was committed to the support of the language and culture of the Slavic peasants in the Balkan lands. It was his belief, and the policy of his government, that the encouragement of the Slavic populations of the empire in their nationalist aspirations would protect them from Russian influence even as it would commit them to the protection of the Habsburgs. Kopitar, who read an essay written in the vernacular Serbian by Vuk, recognized in the younger man the ideal advocate for that vernacular.²

Kopitar proposed a three-part program for the young scholar: the establishment of a vernacular grammar, the writing of a dictionary, and—most important for our purposes—the collection of the oral songs of the people, for he had become aware that Vuk remembered many of them.³ Certainly Kopitar was right, for with his encouragement and assistance, Vuk would first produce a grammar of the vernacular Serbian language in 1815 and a Serbian dictionary three years later. In these works he reduced the complex Slavo-Serbian alphabet from forty characters to thirty, following the then radical principle of the elimination of all unpronounced letters. These works, both of which were of crucial importance to South Slavic linguistics, letters, and history, and neither of which Vuk could have completed without Kopitar, attracted the hostility of the Orthodox Church fathers, who, although recognizing the importance of a vernacular literary language, saw Vuk's radical reforms as attempts that played into the hands of the Austrians and Catholics by turning Serbian loyalties away from Russia, her religion, and her language.⁴

As the imperial authorities perhaps also recognized, Vuk's commitment to the vernacular was radically subversive. For in a sense what Vuk had undertaken was a redefinition of South Slavic nationalism—or indeed of the Serbian nation itself. No longer was that nation, or people (the two words are one in Serbian, ever since Vuk, in his 1818 dictionary, offered one word, narod, to bear both meanings), defined by a shared Orthodox Christian faith and the literary tradition that faith had generated. For the nation Vuk reified in his grammar and dictionary, and later in his collections of songs, was much more broadly based, the great raja⁵ of the Balkans, oppressed and on the edge of rebellion, a potential for disorder in Ottoman lands, yet attracting only occasional support from Vienna. It was the language spoken by that raja that Vuk privileged by establishing its textuality. And it would be the poetry of that language that Vuk would offer to give legitimacy to the language itself.

Thus, in a sense Vuk redefined the South Slav nationality. He provided it with a realistic and viable identity, which would survive the censorship of his collections in Vienna, the early years of Obrenović rule,⁶ and Vuk's own exile from Belgrade after 1832. In his years of exile, the 1830s and 1840s, he traveled in Croatia, Dalmatia, and Montenegro, came to know the peoples of those lands, and attempted to minimize their linguistic differences from the Serbs. Then—after the Obrenovićs themselves were exiled to Vienna in 1842—he received the financial support of Miloš's son and successor, Prince Mihailo. Vuk would also be supported by the “Illyrian” movement centered in Zagreb, which would demand more independence for all the empire's Slavs. Thus Vuk was an honored figure at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in 1848.

After that year of revolution Vuk's assumptions, and his Serbian language, were taken up by a new generation, the generation of the United Serbian Youth movement, which throughout the second half of the nineteenth century rejected the traditional culture of the Serbs in Austria and south Hungary and turned to that of the people in the Balkan homeland.

Duncan Wilson has pointed out that there are two aspects of Vuk's importance, that of the radical reformer and that of the conservative—the conservator of the heritage of oral singing in the Balkans. He has observed that while Vuk's countrymen often overemphasize the first, it is the second that has received the attention of foreign scholars. Certainly, it is the latter aspect that is the more important for our purposes; Vuk was responsible for the collection of the oral poetry that was to become the foundation of the literary culture of the South Slavs. But it was also that work which, by providing the exotic and romantically heroic flavor fashionable in literary circles of the time, attracted the attention of Europe's leading writers, generated translations—and fakery—in English, French, German, Russian, and Polish and, more importantly, helped bring Serbia and the Balkans to the European consciousness.

Even before he had undertaken his grammar, just after the crushing of the first insurrection in 1813 and the flight of yet more refugees into the Srem (the Austrian lands between the Danube and the Sava whose population was then composed mostly of South Slavs), Vuk had also begun to gather from his own memory and from the recitals of relatives and other Serbian exiles a collection of Serbian oral poems, mostly lyrics. He published his first collection, Mala prostonarodnja slaveno-serbska pjesnarica (A Simple Little Slaveno-Serbian Songbook) in 1814.

Vuk then moved into the Srem and prepared a second collection, where he met the guslari and guslare (for there were women singers), who would serve him as sources: Tešan Podrugović, a Bosnian Serb freedom fighter of prodigious size and memory; Filip Višnjić, a blind guslar; and “the blind Živana,” an old woman who would give him “The Kosovo Maiden” and other songs. The songs Vuk heard from these singers were the basis for a second collection, Narodna srbska pjesnarica (A Serbian Book of Folk Songs), published in Vienna in 1815, in which the first of the “heroic” songs, the long narrative histories in deseterac, the ten-beat line of the peasant songs, especially songs of the Battle of Kosovo, of Marko Kraljević, and of the insurrection appeared.

In his work of collecting, Vuk received the encouragement of Lukijan Mušicki, then archimandrite of the monastery at Šišatovac in Srem, who had taught at Sremski Karlovci during Vuk's years in the school there. But it was Vuk's friend Kopitar who showed the collection to the renowned German scholar, Jakob Grimm, then attached to the German diplomatic delegation in Vienna. It was through Grimm that Vuk would meet Goethe and that his collections would establish the fame of Serbian poetry throughout Europe.

Vuk also journeyed east into the Banat to collect more songs from other refugee guslars and hajduks. It was these singers who can be seen as the authors of the songs, for they never sang from texts; their songs were memorial reconstructions set out in deseterci. It is not clear what is meant by “knowing” a song—whether to “know” a song was simply to have the ability to correctly set forth a narrative line and the skill to set it forth in one's own lines, or whether to “know” described an act of memorization of prescribed linguistic structures, or whether the true meaning lay somewhere between these extremes. It is clear, however, that to a great or lesser extent, each singing was a compositional and not purely a recitational act, for each singer sang the songs differently (indeed Vuk himself often collected many versions of a single song). So in a certain sense, regardless of the “age” of the songs, what Vuk was collecting were early nineteenth-century folk songs, all of which, after having been passed on from generation to generation, had passed through the minds and memories of their singers and had been reformed according to their tastes or experience and in the vocabulary of their own cultures.

Vuk's two most important singers had been encountered in Šišatovac as early as 1815. The first—the first singer Vuk heard as an adult—was Tešan Podrugović, a huge man of about forty years who as a youth in Bosnia killed a Turk who had raped a girl in his family. He fled to become a hajduk, then joined the first insurrection under Karadjordje. He fought bravely, but quarreled with his commanding officer and left the army to cross the Danube into the Austrian Srem after the Turks recaptured Serbia. He made a living there as a gatherer of reeds. Vuk made his acquaintance through Obrad, Lukijan Mušicki's cousin, shortly before Easter of 1815, a week after the beginning of the second insurrection under Miloš Obrenović. Vuk was barely able to restrain him from a return to the fighting, and he soon departed to join the other rebels. However, in the summer he left the army again, killed a bey,⁷ and again became an outlaw in Bosnia. There he got into a fight in an inn, where he was beaten by some Turks and died shortly thereafter. Podrugović recited (he did not sing) his songs to Vuk, many of them very funny, with a straight face, never smiling. He knew hundreds; Vuk had a sense that many remained unsung. He collected twenty-two songs from Podrugović, notably comic songs and hajduk songs, of the experience that he knew so well. Vuk called Podrugović “the first and the best” of his singers.⁸

Shortly after Podrugović had departed with his unsung songs, Vuk met his second singer, a successful guslar (the only professional singer Vuk would encounter) named Filip Višnjić. Višnjić, who had been born in Bosnia in the vicinity of Bijeljina and had been blinded by smallpox at eight, had fled after his father died, members of the family were tortured and killed, and his uncle Marko was hanged for killing a Turk who had raped a member of the family. Višnjić became a professional singer, singing both to Turks and Christians, and traveled as far south as Skadar, then came to Serbia in 1804, found himself in the midst of the battles of the first insurrection, crossed into the Srem in 1810, and settled in the village of Grk. There he was well received and well paid for his singing. Vuk met him when Višnjić was about fifty years old, well-off and successful as a guslar who regularly performed in public. He was perhaps Vuk's most popular singer and was remembered by the villagers for years afterward. When Višnjić died in Grk in 1834 he was buried with a gusle carved on his cross.⁹

Višnjić was extremely capable as a singer. His songs—notably songs of the first insurrection—were worked with new formulas, perhaps the most accomplished of the songs collected by Vuk. Vuk transcribed from him a total of nearly forty songs—over ten thousand lines all together. It was this transcription that formed the nucleus of what was to be Vuk's extensive and monumental collection, Narodne srpske pjesme, published in Leipzig between 1823 and 1833, the so-called Leipzig edition.

There would be other singers. There was “the blind Jeca,” a woman singer whom Vuk met in Zemun and who sang “The Death of Duke Prijezda” for him;¹⁰ there was “the blind Stepanija,” who gave him both a version of “The Building of Skadar” and “Tsaritsa Milica and Duke Vladeta.” There was an unnamed blind woman from the village of Grgurevci from whom Vuk took three of the finest of the Kosovo songs, “The Fall of the Serbian Empire,” “The Death of the Mother of the Jugovićes,” and “The Kosovo Maiden.”¹¹ Indeed, it is strange to discover how many of the historical songs, and many of them among the finest, were sung by blind and presumably illiterate women singers, whose access to their material must have been either mnemonic or purely imaginative.

There were other great male singers as well: “Old Milija,” whose “Banović Strahinja,” perhaps the single greatest of the poems, reflected the tragedies of his own life; “Old Raško” (in the patriarchal culture of Vuk's Serbia the attribution of “old” was honorific and not merely descriptive), the singer of several of the medieval songs: Stojan the Outlaw, who, in prison in Serbia for having killed a woman who (he said) “ate” his child, in 1820 gave Vuk the magnificent “The Wedding of King Vukašin”;¹² and several others. These were the true authors of the heroic songs; in the final analysis Vuk was really only their editor and collector.

The fruits of Vuk's work as a collector of the oral songs came between 1823 and 1833 in the now famous and greatly expanded Leipzig edition. For in spite of his recognition abroad Vuk had difficulties at home. The Office of the Censor in Vienna, probably provoked by the Orthodox clergy in Austria, denied permission for Vuk's Narodna srbska pjesnarica, so it was in Leipzig that the book appeared. In this edition were many new songs that Vuk had more recently collected. And with its four volumes Vuk established the arrangement of the poems that was to become the basic pattern of all subsequent editions. Volume 1 (1824) presented the Ženske pjesme or Women's Songs, the lyric poems, usually not in deseterci, short, mythic narratives, many of pre-Christian origins, and the round dances. The second volume (1823)¹³ was identified by Vuk as the Pjesme junačke najstarije, or the Oldest Heroic Songs, the narrative and historical songs in deseterac that—because they made no mention of firearms—Vuk regarded as the oldest. The third volume (1823), Pjesme junačke srednjijeh vremena (Heroic Songs of the Middle Period), consisted mainly of hajduk narrative songs and other songs set during the years of the Turkish occupation. A decade later there appeared Volume 4, Pjesme junačke novijih vremena o vojevanju za slobodu (Heroic Songs of the Recent Times of the War for Freedom), where were collected the songs of the Montenegrin and Serbian insurrections.

After the Leipzig edition Vuk, with the uncertain patronage of Prince Mihailo Obrenović, then exiled to Vienna, traveled south, to Montenegro and its Bay of Kotor, to Dubrovnik and Lika on the Dalmatian coast, places he had not visited before, known for their oral songs. His search there for other guslari, for new poems, and for variants of poems he had already heard was in preparation for what would be a definitive “Viennese” edition of the collection—some 1,045 poems—entitled Srpske narodne pjesme and published again in four volumes, in 1841, 1845, 1846, and 1862.¹⁴

There have been many subsequent editions of the songs—a somewhat bowdlerized edition by Ljubomir Stojanović in 1891-1901 (it was reprinted between the world wars); an annotated edition by Djurić, Matić, Banašević, and Latković in 1953-1954; Nedić's edition of the Viennese edition in 1969; and an edition with the “objectionable” poems separated in a volume not publicly sold, in 1973-1974.¹⁵ For the Serbs, Srpske narodne pjesme constitutes the “classic anthology” (in the Confucian sense) of Serbian oral poetry.

Vuk Karadžić was neither the first nor the last to collect or to transcribe the oral songs of the Balkans. As Koljević tells us, there are references to the singing of the South Slavs throughout the seventeenth century. But much earlier, as early as the twelfth century, at least one hagiography and several of the Dukljanin's chronicles may have been based on oral narrative songs. There is a transcription of a fragment of a Slavic oral song, transcribed by Ruggiero Pazienza, a court poet of the Queen of Naples, in the village of Gioia del Colle in southern Italy in 1497; it is extant in the fifth volume of an eight-volume courtly epic, Lo Balzino, the manuscript of which is presently located in the City Library in Perugia.¹⁶

Around 1555 a bugarštica, a heroic song conducted in the “long line” of fourteen to sixteen syllables and associated with a courtly tradition of oral performance, entitled “Marko Kraljević and his Brother Andrijaš,” was transcribed on the island of Hvar, then the richest Venetian community in Dalmatia. In 1568 Petar Hektorović, a nobleman from the same island, published in Venice a poem written in the long line of the bugarštica, a fisherman's eclogue (then popular in Italy), which contained transcriptions of several of the oral songs sung by his fishermen companions on a fishing expedition. And many other bugarštice—recounting the collapse of the Serbian Empire at the end of the fourteenth century and the events of the subsequent Turkish occupation—were transmitted and published in the towns along the Adriatic Sea and elsewhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—by Nikola Ohmučević, a merchant, later by the poet Ivan Gundulić, by Djuro Matijašević, a cleric (all citizens of Dubrovnik), and by others living in or around Kotor in the Bay of Kotor, another major Venetian colony and a city long important to Serbs, and elsewhere.

These bugarštice were poems that exemplified the degeneration of an older poetic form prevalent in feudal court poetry and then surviving as a form of popular entertainment in various cities and towns along the Adriatic coast. No longer feudal poetry, the bugarštice had become urban poems, essentially bourgeois in their assumptions. They described banquets and toasts, concerned themselves with the appropriateness of manners and clothing, showed familiarity with money, and demonstrated an awareness of a greater world and its political realities. But the bugarštice still contained elements—motifs, stylistic devices, even stock phrases and formulaic patterns, which belonged to their courtly predecessors and may originally have been mnemonic in function.

However, it was not the bugarštice but the deseteračke pesme (deseterci), the songs conducted in ten-syllable lines, being sung at the time in the patriarchal peasant villages of the Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin uplands, even in Croatia, that were Vuk's concern. The deseterci were products of a different culture, not urban but peasant, not bourgeois but patriarchal, and as such they told their stories in a different vernacular—less sophisticated, perhaps, more metaphorical and less accurately realistic in representations of things like money and banquets and fine clothes. But their shorter line gave for a certain economy of epithet, and the narrative moved more cleanly. The motifs and patterns and phrasings surviving in the bugarštice were tightened and simplified in the deseterci. Also, the heroes of the deseterci seemed to live in a less ordered world, a world of violence and uncertainty, of pragmatic values and compromise, the world of the uplands, not in the more ordered world of the songs sung on the civilized coast.¹⁷

The deseterac line is dominantly trochaic, end-stopped, and unrhymed (occasionally internal rhyme is employed). Most important, each line is divided into two parts by a strong caesura, which always occurs after the fourth syllable. This line has a rhythm known to every Serb. It is so familiar, and so charged with association, that—like those written in the bugarštica—the poems themselves are identified by their special metrical norm.

The deseterci were also transcribed and translated.¹⁸ The earliest extant transcriptions of the deseterci songs were set down in Perast (then an aristocratic Venetian community in the Bay of Kotor on the Adriatic) around the end of the seventeenth century, and appeared beside bugarštice. Then, around 1720, songs sung by Slav soldiers near Vienna were transcribed—very imperfectly—in a manuscript in which 217 lyrics and epics were collected; this manuscript, the “Erlangen manuscript,” was discovered in 1913 in the Erlangen University library and is of great value if one wishes to consider the changes brought about when the presumably courtly songs, having passed to the uses of a bourgeois merchant society, then fell into the hands of Slavic peasants and outlaws under the domination of a foreign power.

Later in the century, in 1774, an Italian traveler and scholar, Alberto Fortis, who had taken an interest in the Italian translations of MacPherson's Ossian, traveled to the Dalmatian islands and there translated into Italian two songs, one of which is today known as the Hasanaginica or “The Wife of Hasan Aga.” They were then translated by Goethe into German and appeared in Herder's Volkslieder (1778, 1779), which generated the first enthusiasm among newly romanticized European readers. Walter Scott made an English version (“The Wife of Hasan Aga”) of the Hasanaginica from the German.¹⁹ Madame de Stael declared herself “ravie”; Prosper Mérimée produced a fraudulent French version of a heroic song; and Pushkin followed Mérimée. But by this time Vuk had begun his collection, which coincided with the first insurrection. And then, as we have said, his Narodna srbska pjesnarica caught the attention of Jakob Grimm, then Europe's greatest comparatist.²⁰

Grimm and his brother translated nineteen of Vuk's songs for Forster's Sängerfahrt in 1818. Then the daughter of a German university professor from Halle, Fräulein Theresa Albertina Luisa von Jacob, an enthusiastic disciple of Goethe, with his encouragement translated slightly less than half of Vuk's first collection into German (using her initials “Talvj” as her nom de plume), beginning in the 1820s. Talvj was the first to translate Vuk's transmissions of the Serbian songs into a major European language.²¹ Again there was a spate of retranslation. The first into English seems to have been that of John Gibson Lockhart, Scott's biographer, in an anonymous and privately printed collection of 1826 entitled Translations from the Servian Minstrelsy: to Which are Added Some Specimens of Anglo-Norman Romances (Lockhart, the editor of the Quarterly Review, acknowledged his role as retranslator in that journal in 1845).²² But by far more important is Sir John Bowring's Servian Popular Poetry of 1827; in it appear English versions of some 107 “songs and ballads,” translations made, presumably, from Talvj's German versions but with reference to Vuk's Serbian texts.²³

So it was Vuk Karadžić who shaped—for his own European literary world, but, more importantly, for many Serbs—a new sense of nationality. He did this in a collection of songs in a language that he had also made it possible to read (through his grammar and dictionary) and that would serve as the vernacular of a newly forming literary tradition. If the importance of such an undertaking had been recognized even before its achievement by others, it was Vuk to whom we owe that achievement. There is no person in the cultural history of the Balkans whose work is more entirely beneficent than Vuk. Had its history been different, had Vuk's definition of nationality ultimately obtained, the history of the Balkan people of our own time might well have been more benign than that brought to them by other visions.

Notes

1. Outlaw brigands living in bands in the highlands of the Balkans, some of whom may have been politically motivated to rebellion against Turkish rule.

2. Much of the biographical information in this section is taken from Duncan Wilson's remarkable biography, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić: 1787-1864 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), and from George Rapall Noyes and Leonard Bacon, eds. and trans., Heroic Ballads of Servia (Boston: Sherman, French, 1913). Antun Barac's A History of Yugoslav Literature (Belgrade: Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations, 1955, and Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1973), and, of course, Svetozar Koljević's authoritative work on the epics in English, The Epic in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), subsequently cited as “Koljević,” have been of inestimable critical value.

3. Duncan Wilson, The Life and Times of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, 2-3; subsequently cited as “Wilson.”

4. See Wilson, 2.

5. The raja were the Christian peasantry of the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire.

6. The second modern Serbian dynasty, established by the leader of the second insurrection, Miloš Obrenović, who ruled from 1815 to 1839 and from 1858 to 1860. The first dynasty began with Karadjordje.

7. A “bey” (beg) is a Turkish district governor.

8. See Wilson, 106-8; Karadžić's introduction to the Leipzig edition, vols. 1 and 4; and Koljević, 311-14 et passim.

9. See Wilson, 110-11, and Koljević, 306-10 et passim; see also Karadžić's introduction to volume 4 of the Leipzig edition.

10. See Koljević, 89-90.

11. See Koljević, 319.

12. See Koljević, 127.

13. The second and third volumes were published in 1823 before the first, in 1824.

14. Koljević, 345. V. Nedić reproduced this edition, correcting only misprints, in Srpske narodne pjesme, Belgrade: Prosveta, 1969.

    Throughout his life—or at least until he received the support of Prince Mihailo—Vuk suffered from lack of money, so he did not confine his literary activities to his collections but collaborated with Leopold von Ranke on a history of contemporary Serbia (which contained accounts of the insurrections) in 1828 and a first description of Serbia's now famous monasteries in 1821. Moreover, also on Kopitar's advice, he undertook a translation of the New Testament into vernacular Serbian.

15. Ljubomir Stojanović, ed., Srpske narodne pjesme, by Vuk St. Karadžić, 9 vols. (Belgrade, 1891-1901); Vojislav Djurić, Svetozar Matić, Nikola Banašević, Vido Latković, eds., Srpske narodne pjesme, by Vuk St. Karadžić, 4 vols. (Belgrade, 1953-1954); Vladan Nedić, ed., Srpske narodne pjesme 4 vols. (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1969), and Srpske narodne pjesme iz neobjavljenih rukopisa Vuka Stef. Karadžića (Serbian Folk Poems from the Unpublished Manuscripts of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić) 4 vols. (Belgrade, 1973-1974).

16. See Koljević, 11-28. We are much indebted to Koljević for the following discussion.

17. Koljević discusses the bugarštice in his chapter entitled “The Grand Stammer”; see Koljević, 31-68. The bugarštice are presented in English translation in an anthology by John S. Miletich entitled The Bugarštice: A Bilingual Anthology of the Earliest Extant South Slavic Folk Narrative Song (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

18. Translators of the deseterci have over the years remained undecided whether to reproduce the line itself or to suggest its cultural resonance. Over the nearly two hundred years during which English translators have attempted the deseterac, very few have agreed upon an appropriate metrical procedure. Some English translators have sought the nearest English equivalent in associative force; they have generally translated into heroic couplet or blank verse, sometimes into ballad stanza. Still others, fearing that the deseterac would prove a metrical form too rigidly invariable for the English ear, especially when in translation it must be unaccompanied by the counterrhythms established by the gusle, sought complex and variable solutions. The most recent English translations of the heroic songs, the distinguished translations by Anne Pennington and Peter Levi collected in Marko the Prince: Serbo-Croat Heroic Songs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), make no attempt to establish a metrical equivalent for the deseterac.

    The strong caesura has remained a problem for the English translator as well (albeit less so than for translators into other languages). Some leave it unmarked; some space so as to render two half-lines as in Anglo-Saxon; some, especially translators who have recently attempted the deseterac itself, have divided the ten syllables into two half-lines organically defined and have broken the lines syntactically, or at breath pauses.

    In our own translations we have attempted to conform closely to the syllabic and caesural conventions of the deseterac and have at the same time attempted to reduce its monotony, a monotony relieved in the performance of the Serbian poems by conducting the translations in a meter that, especially in the second half-lines, is a highly variable iambic (more natural to the English ear). And we have attempted to conform to a “plain” style, that of the guslars.

19. For a discussion of Walter Scott's translation see D. H. Low, “The First Link Between English and Serbo-Croat Literature,” Slavonic Review 3 (1924): 362-69.

20. See Koljević's introduction to Pennington and Levi's Marko the Prince, xiii-xvii. See also Dragutin Subotić, Yugoslav Popular Ballads: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 165ff.

21. See Subotić, Ballads 165ff., and his “Serbian Popular Poetry in English Literature,” Slavonic Review 5 (March 1927): 628-46.

22. See Subotić, Ballads 243-44.

23. See Subotić, Ballads 225-43.