CHAPTER III: SERBIAN NATIONAL EPIC POETRY

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 mediæval 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 Haïdooks (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 cæsura 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.