The Importance of the Ballads
That the Serbian people--as a distinct Slav and Christian
nationality--did not succumb altogether to the Ottoman oppressor; that
through nearly five centuries of subjection to the Turk the Southern
Slavs retained a deep consciousness of their national ideals, is due
in a very large measure to the Serbian national poetry, which has kept
alive in the hearts of the Balkan Christians deep hatred of the Turk,
and has given birth, among the oppressed Slavs, to the sentiment
of a common misfortune and led to the possibility of a collective
effort which issued in the defeat of the Turk on the battlefields of
Koumanovo, Monastir, Prilip, Prizrend, Kirk-Kilisse, and Scutari.
Who has written those poems? We might as well ask, who is the author
of the Iliad and the Odyssey? If Homer be the collective pseudonym
of an entire cycle of Hellenic national bards, 'The Serbian people'
is that of the national bards who chanted those Serbian epic poems
during the centuries, and to whom it was nothing that their names
should be attached to them. The task of the learned Diascevastes
of Pisistrate's epoch, which they performed with such ability in
the old Hellade, has been done in Serbia by a self-taught peasant,
the famous Vouk Stephanovitch-Karadgitch, in the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Vouk's first collection of Serbian national poems,
which he wrote down as he heard them from the lips of the gousslari
(i.e. Serbian national bards), was published for the first time at
Vienna in 1814, and was not only eagerly read throughout Serbia and
in the literary circles of Austria and Germany, but also in other
parts of Europe. Goethe himself translated one of the ballads, and
his example was quickly followed by others.
Those poems--as may be seen from the examples given in this
volume--dwell upon the glory of the Serbian mediaeval empire, lost
on the fatal field of Kossovo (1389). When the Turks conquered the
Serbian lands and drove away the flower of the Serbian aristocracy,
these men took refuge in the monasteries and villages, where the
Turkish horsemen never came. There they remained through centuries
undisturbed, inspired by the eloquence of the Serbian monks, who
considered it their sacred duty to preserve for the nation behind
their old walls the memory of ancient kings and tzars and of the
glorious past in which they flourished.
Professional bards went from one village to another, chanting
in an easy decasyllabic verse the exploits of Serbian heroes and
Haidooks (knight-brigands), who were the only check upon the Turkish
atrocities. The bards carried news of political and other interesting
events, often correct, sometimes more or less distorted, and the
gifted Serbians--for gifted they were and still are--did not find
it difficult to remember, and to repeat to others, the stories thus
brought to them in poetic form. As the rhythm of the poems is easy,
and as the national ballads have become interwoven with the spirit of
every true Serbian, it is not rare that a peasant who has heard a poem
but once can not only repeat it as he heard it, but also improvise
passages; nay, he can at times even compose entire original ballads
on the spur of inspirational moments.
In Serbian Hungary there are schools in which the blind learn these
national ballads, and go from one fair to another to recite them before
the peasants who come from all Serbian lands. But this is not the true
method. In the mountains of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina
there is no occasion to learn them mechanically: they are familiar to
all from infancy. When, in the winter evening, the members of a Serbian
family assemble around the fire, and the women are engaged with their
spinning, poems are recited by those who happen to know them best.
The Goussle
The ballads are recited invariably to the accompaniment of a primitive
instrument with a single string, called a goussle, which is to be met
with in almost every house. The popular Serbian poet, Peter Petrovitch,
in his masterpiece, Gorsky Viyenatz ('The Mountain Wreath') uttered
the following lines, which have become proverbial:
Dye se goussle u kutyi ne tchuyu
Tu su mrtva i kutya i lyoudi.
(The house in which the goussle is not heard
Is dead, as well as the people in it.)
The old men, with grown-up sons, who are excused from hard labour,
recite to their grandchildren, who yield themselves with delight to the
rhythmic verse through which they receive their first knowledge of the
past. Even the abbots of the monasteries do not deem it derogatory to
recite those ballads and to accompany their voices by the monotonous
notes of the goussle. But the performance has more of the character
of a recitation than of singing: the string is struck only at the
end of each verse. In some parts of Serbia, however, each syllable
is accentuated by a stroke of the bow, and the final syllable is
somewhat prolonged.
The heroic decasyllabic lines have invariably five trochees, with
the fixed caesura after the second foot; and almost every line is in
itself a complete sentence.
There is hardly a tavern or inn in any Serbian village where one could
see an assembly of peasants without a gousslar, around whom all are
gathered, listening with delight to his recitals. At the festivals
near the cloisters, where the peasants meet together in great numbers,
professional gousslars recite the heroic songs and emphasize the
pathetic passages in such an expressive manner that there is hardly a
listener whose cheeks are not bedewed with copious tears. The music
is extremely simple, but its simplicity is a powerful and majestic
contrast to the exuberance of romance manifested in the exploits and
deeds of some favourite hero--as, for example, the Royal Prince Marko.
There are many bold hyperboles in those national songs, and little
wonder if they are discredited by Western critics, especially in the
ballads concerning the exploits of the beloved Marko--who "throws his
heavy mace aloft as high as the clouds and catches it again in his
right hand, without dismounting from his trusty courser Sharatz." Now
and then an English reader may find passages which may seem somewhat
coarse, but he must bear in mind that the ballads have usually been
composed and transmitted from generation to generation by simple
and illiterate peasants. Most of those concerning the Royal Prince
Marko date from the early fourteenth century, when the customs,
even in Western Europe, were different from those prevailing
now. My translations have, however, been carefully revised by
Mrs. C. H. Farnam, who has taken a great interest in this book, and
has endeavoured to do no injustice to the rugged originals. Having
passed some time in Serbia--as many noble English ladies have
done--nursing the wounded heroes of the Balkan War, of 1912-13,
and softening their pain with unspeakable tenderness and devotion,
she was attracted by the natural, innate sense of honesty and the
bravery which her cultivated mind discovered in those simple Serbians
and her interest has since extended to their history and literature.
It is worthy of consideration that the history of the Serbian and
other Southern Slavonic nations, developed by its poetry--if not
even replaced by it altogether--has through it been converted into a
national property, and is thus preserved in the memory of the entire
people so vividly that a Western traveller must be surprised when he
hears even the most ignorant Serbian peasant relate to him something at
least of the old kings and tsars of the glorious dynasty of Nemagnitch,
and of the feats and deeds of national heroes of all epochs.