CHALLENGES

[Nonson]

Somni,

How you do rant and rave when it is denied you.


^_^Piece^_^

[Somniferous]

Nonnie, the Solomon of Lilly the Sulameth,

I am 29 years old.

The age range I'm interested is 20-30. With all my admiration of Lilly's beauty (poetized by you but never observed by me) and art talent (poetized by me and never observed by you)...

Possess her, Nonson!... If you can.

[Nonson]

Somni,

Boy, must I ever be instructing you?

Here again is LESSON #1:

Man does not possess the WOMAN.

The WOMAN possesses the man.


However, I accept your offer. Lilly is far to experienced for one of your tender age.

[Lilly]

HA!

The biggest sexual organ is the brain. I have learned to control my carnal impulses, even though I feel like I am going to explode sometimes.

I saved it for my beloved, who ever he will be now, since my Captain has abandoned ship.

My legs are crossed so tight, you can't pull a needle out with a set of pliers!

I am without a rudder, and listing. Won't be long before this ship goes under.

And please, no more Rear Admiral jokes.

LillyNomad

[Lilly]

I have used that "moistly awaiting" for 18 monthes on some of the boards.


Now for a little history lesson:
As for the Kosovo Devoyka (Maiden): It is a famous Poem and painting of a young girl walking among the dead after the battle. She carries a jug of water, searching for her beloved and mourns the loss of so many valiant men who died in battle. It is also one of the most common needle point pictures that most Serb woman work on and hang on their wall.

As for the Muslims, my husband was raised in Sarajevo and has ingegrated with the Muslims all his life. Everything was fine and everyone got along well, until the Bosnian War.

In his family - distant cousins, are muslims which have intermarried, along with Croats.

LillyNomad

THE BALLAD OF THE KOSOVO MAIDEN

On a Sunday early in the morning
The Maid of Kosovo awoke to brilliant sun
And rolled her sleeves above her snow-white elbows;
On her back she carries warm, white bread,
And in her hands she bears two golden goblets,
one of water, one of dark red wine.
Seeking out the plain of Kosovo,
She walks upon the field of slaughter there
Where noble Lazarus, the Tsar, was slain,
And turns the warriors over in their blood;
Should one still breathe she bathes him with the water
And offers him, as if in sacrament,
The dark red wine to drink, the bread to eat.
At length she comes to Pavle Orlovich,
Standard-bearer of his lord the Tsar,
And finds him still alive, though torn and maimed:
His right hand and his left leg are cut off
And his handsome chest is crushed and broken
So that she can see his lungs inside.
She moves him from the pool of blood
And bathes his wounds with clear and cool water;
She offers him, as if in sacrament,
The dark red wine to drink, the bread to eat.
When she has thus attended to his needs,
Pavle Orlovich revives and speaks:
"Maid of Kosovo, my dearest sister,
What misfortune leads you to this plain
To turn the warriors over in their blood?
Whom can you be looking for out here?
Have you lost a brother or a nephew?
Have you lost perhaps an aging father?"
And the Maid of Kosovo replies:
"O my brother, O my unknown hero!
It is not for someone of my blood
I'm searching: not an aging father;
Neither is it for a brother or a nephew.
Do you remember, brave and unknown warrior,
When Lazar gave communion to his army
With the help of thirty holy monks
Near the lovely church of Samodrezha
And it took them twenty days to do it?
All the Serbian army took communion.
At the end there came three warrior Lords:
The first was captain Milosh Obilich,
The next was Ivan Kosanchich,
And the last the warrior Milan Toplitsa.
It happened that I stood beside the gates
As Milosh Obilich passed grandly by-
There is no fairer warrior in this world-
He trailed his saber there upon the stones
And on his head he wore a helmet made
Of wound white silk with feathers intertwined
A brightly colored cloak hung down his back
And round his neck he wore a silken scarf.
As he passed he turned and looked at me
And offered me his brightly colored cloak,
Took it off and gave it to me, saying:
'Maiden, take this brightly colored cloak
By which I hope you will remember me-
This cloak by which you can recall my name:
Dear soul, I'm going out to risk my life
In battle for the great Tsar Lazarus;
Pray God, my love, that I return alive,
And that good fortune shortly shall be yours:
I will give you as a bride to Milan,
Milan Toplitsa, my sworn blood-brother,
Noble Milan who became my brother
Before God Almighty and Saint John:
To him I'll give you as a virgin bride.'
After him rode Ivan Kosanchich-
There is no fairer warrior in this world.
He trailed his saber there upon the stones
And on his head he wore a helmet made
Of wound white silk with feathers intertwined,
A brightly colored cloak hung down his back
While round his neck he wore a silken scarf
And on his hand he had a golden ring.
As he passed he turned and looked at me
And offered me the glowing golden ring,
Took it off and gave it to me saying:
'Maiden, take this golden wedding ring
By which I hope you will remember me-
This ring by which you can recall my name:
Dear soul, I'm going out to risk my life
In battle for the great Tsar Lazarus;
Pray God, my love, that I return alive,
And that good fortune shortly shall be yours:
I will give you as a bride to Milan,
Milan Toplitsa, my sworn blood-brother,
Noble Milan who became my brother
Before God Almighty and Saint John:
I will be the best man at your wedding.'
After him rode Milan Toplitsa-
There is no fairer warrior in this world.
He trailed his saber there upon the stones
And on his head he wore a helmet made
Of wound white silk with feathers intertwined,
A brightly colored cloak hung down his back
While round his neck he wore a silken scarf
And on his wrist he had a golden torque
As he passed he turned and looked at me
And offered me the shining golden torque,
Took it off and gave it to me, saying:
'Maiden, take this shining golden torque
By which I hope you will remember me-
This torque by which you can recall my name:
Dear soul, I'm going out to risk my life
In battle for the great Tsar Lazarus;
Pray God, my love, that I return alive,
And that good fortune shortly shall be yours
And I will take you for my faithful wife.'
With that the warrior Lords all rode away-
And so I search upon this field of slaughter."
Pavle Orlovich then spoke and said:
"O my dearest sister, Maid of Kosovo!
Do you see, dear soul, those battle-lances
Where they're piled the highest over there?
That is where the blood of heroes flowed
In pools higher than the flanks of horses,
Higher even than the horses' saddles-
right up to the riders' silken waistbands.
Those you came to find have fallen there;
Go back, maiden, to your white-walled dwelling.
Do not stain your skirt and sleeves with blood."
When she has heard the wounded hero's words
She weeps, and tears flow down her pale face;
She leaves the plain of Kosovo and walks
To her white village wailing, crying out:-
"O pity, pity! I am cursed so utterly
That if I touched a greenly leafing tree
it would dry and wither, blighted and defiled."



THE MIRACLE OF LAZAR'S HEAD
When they cut off Lazar's head upon the Blackbirds' Field
Not a single Serb was there to see it
But it happened that a Turkish boy saw,
A slave, the son of one who had been made
Herself a slave, a Serbian mother
Thus the boy spoke having seen it all:
"Oh have pity, brothers; Oh have pity, Turks.
Here before us lies a sovereign's noble head!
In God's name it would be a sin
If it were pecked at by the eagles and the crows
Or trampled on by horses and by heroes."
He took the head of holy Lazar then
And covered it and put it in a sack
And carried it until he found a spring
And put the head into the waters there
For forty years the head lay in that spring
While the body lay upon the field at Kosovo
It was not pecked by eagles or by crows.
It was not trampled on by horses or by heroes.
For that, Dear Lord, all thanks be to Thee.
Then one day there came from lovely Skoplje
A group of youthful carters who conveyed
Bulgarians and Greeks to Vidin and to Nish
And stopped to spend the night at Kosovo.
They made a dinner on that level field,
And ate and then grew thirsty afterwards.
They lit the candle in their lantern then
And went to look for waters of a spring.
Then it was that one young carter said:
"See the brilliant moonlight in the water there."
The second carter answered him:
"My brother, I don't think it's moonlight,"
While the third was silent, saying nothing,
Turning in his silence to the east,
And all at once calling out to God,
The one true God, and holy sainted Nicholas:
"Help me God! Help me holy Nicholas!"
He plunged into the waters of the spring
And lifted out into the quiet air
The holy head of Lazar, Tsar of all the Serbs.
He placed it on the green grass by the spring
And turned to get some water in a jug
So the thirsty carters all could drink.
When next they looked upon the fertile earth
The head no longer rested on the grass
But rolled out all alone across the level field,
The holy head moving towards the body
To join it the way it was before.
When in the morning bright day dawned
The three young carters sent the tidings off-
A message to the holy Christian priests
Which summoned some three hundred of them there
And summoned bishops, twelve of them,
And summoned four old patriarchs
From Pech, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.
They all put on their holy vestments then,
Put on their heads the tall peaked caps of monks,
And took into their hands the ancient chronicles,
And read out prayers, and kept long vigils there
For three long days and three dark nights,
Neither sitting down nor seeking any rest,
Neither lying down nor ever sleeping,
But questioning the saint and asking him
To which great church or monastery he would go:
Whether Opovo or Krushedol,
Whether Jaska or Beshenovo,
Whether Rakovats or Shishatovats
Whether Djivsha or Kuvezhdin
Or whether he would rather go to Macedonia.
But the saint would go to none of these,
And wished to stay at lovely Ravanitsa,
The church he had himself endowed
Which rose below the mountain of Kuchaj-
His own church, the one he built himself,
Built with his own bread, with his own treasure,
And not with tears wept by wretched subjects,
In those years he walked upon this earth.


@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

I respect all faiths, as I have so many times posted on all boards. Worship a cactus; I don't care. If your belief makes you a better and more humane person - then more power to you. If your belief extends to using violence in the name of your God, then I would rethink the reasoning behind that.

NEXT!

[Edited by Lilly on 4th June 2001 at 19:24]

[Lilly]

Originally posted by Somniferous
Lily,

Why Kosovo is so much venerated by Serbs I have no slightest idea - it was the spot where the Serbian army suffered the most comprehensive and tragic defeat in their history at the hands (armed with yatagans) of Moslem hosts.

For you to claim being a Kosovar girl means to be a girl raped by a bandwagon Turk following his cutting off the head of your dear husband and pinning your children on his lance.

Reconsider your hail.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry.

Commemorating the Serbian Empire's defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments of poems have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, the brilliance of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe, Jacob Grimm, Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin.

The Serbian Empire reached its brief moment of glory in the mid-fourteenth century during the reign of Tsar Stefan Dusan. Two centuries earlier, the Nemanja dynasty was born when its founder, Stefan Nemanja, obtained recognition from the Emperor of Byzantium as grand zhupan of Serbia in 1159. Nemanja's younger son, Stefan the First-crowned, and his remarkable brother Sava, established the kingdom on a firm military, cultural, and religious basis after the Crusaders' victory over the Byzantines at Constantinople in 1204. Stefan became king in 1217, and by 1219 Sava had succeeded in establishing an autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church with himself at its head as archbishop. By 1331, following the violent reign of Milutin and the murder by his son of Stefan Dechanski, Stefan Dusan, patricide and political visionary, was king, becoming tsar in 1346. He pacified Bulgaria by marrying the Bulgarian tsar's sister, conquered much of Macedonia, defended himself against the aggressive Hungarians, and aspired to the crown of Byzantium while ruling over a rapidly expanding empire which stretched from the Sava to the Gulf of Corinth, from the Bulgarian border to the Adriatic Sea. Rebecca West has famously compared him with Elizabeth I, saying that upon his sudden death in 1355, and with the resulting factional struggles which occurred during the reign of his son Uros and coincided with the Ottoman invasions culminating in the battles of Marica and Kosovo, it is probable that as much was deducted from civilization "as the sum of England after the Tudor Age."1

The chief contenders in the factional struggle after 1356 were two members of the Serbian nobility, the brothers Vukasin and Ugljesa. By 1371 they had recognized too late the necessity of unity against the Turks, and perished together fighting Sultan Murad's marshal, Evrenos, at the Battle of Marica. In this year Uros also died without an heir. Now the claimants for the throne of Serbia were three: Marko, the son of Vukasin; Tvrtko, the king of Bosnia; and Lazar, the nobleman who would lead the armies at the Battle of Kosovo and become the much-mythologized and Christ-like tsar of the epic songs. The son of Vukasin experienced a similar metamorphosis and became, in time, the epic hero Marko Kraljevic.

***********!!!!!!!
"The image of disaster of the Battle of Kosovo has lived for centuries in Serbian literary and oral traditions with the elusive vividness of a hallucination," writes Svetozar Koljevic.2 History, in fact, is a good deal less informative than are poetry, folklore, and song; less vividly hallucinatory, it is more like a mirage. What we know is that nine years after the Battle of Marica, Lazar managed to bring his own forces together with those of his son-in-law, Vuk Brankovic, Tvrtko of Bosnia, and other powerful Serbian and Croat leaders for a decisive battle on Kosovo field, the Field of Blackbirds, on St. Vitus's Day, 1389. The fortress at Nis had fallen to Murad twenty-five days before at the end of his steady progress toward the Danube and Sava across the valley of the Morava. The Kosovo battle resulted in heavy losses on both sides, but seems to have been devastating for the Serbs in that most of their leaders and nobility were killed or driven into exile. Sultan Murad was assassinated behind his lines by a Serbian knight, Milos Obilic, and Lazar was captured and beheaded by the Turks. The epic songs give two contradictory reasons for the Serbian defeat: the treachery of Vuk Brankovic - which seems to have no basis in fact - and Lazar's decision before the battle to sacrifice his earthly kingdom for a heavenly kingdom, to lead his men into battle knowing what the tragic outcome was to be as one might lead a host of martyrs consciously into a conflagration. Although full Turkish domination of Serbia was actually only very slowly achieved by Murad's successors, and while the final and conclusive battle was not fought until 1459 for the fortress at Smederevo on the Danube, it is Kosovo which has lived in the popular imagination and in epic poetry as the moment of annihilation and enslavement. Bernard Johnson has compared the "popular belief in 'a great nation strangled at birth' " to "the legends surrounding the Batle of Hastings ... or Roncesvalles."3 One might also invoke The Gododdin of Aneirin and the Welsh defeat at Catraeth or, it goes without saying, the fall of Troy. Vasko Popa, who like Ivan Lalic and Miodrag Pavlovic, brings the myth of Kosovo forward from the epic songs into the Yugoslav poetry of our own day, writes in Earth Erect:

A field like no other
Heaven above it
Heaven below4

II
Scholars are still uncertain at what point precisely the songs of Kosovo began to be sung. The decasyllabic poems emerging from a patriarchal village context were preceded by, and evidently for a while developed parallel to, the poems in lines of fourteen to sixteen syllables emerging from a feudal context in an urban Adriatic setting known as bugarstice. This tradition may have been uprooted from its natural home in the medieval Serbian courts and obliged to go into exile with those who patronized it and became, in some cases, its epic heroes. Or it may have originated with the fugitives in exile. At any rate, after the Turkish victories at Marica, Kosovo, and finally Smederevo, many Serbs, including numbers of the surviving nobility, migrated to Bosnia, Herzegovina, and along the Adriatic coast, some of them settling in or near the Republic of Ragusa, later to become the city of Dubrovnik.

Dragutin Subotic believes that the strong influence of Italian literature and popular poetry in Ragusa - the Sicilian originals of current strambotti and rispetti, for example, as much as Ariosto and Tasso - together with the appearance there of troubadour poetry (perhaps through the agency of Petrarch) and certain Castilian romances with their dominant theme of the struggle between Christianity and Islam, acted on the memories of educated Serbian exiles to produce the first bugarstice based on accumulating oral histories and folklore sometime in the late fifteenth century.5 Many of these poems dealt with the struggles between Serbs or Croats and the Turks, although most of them sang of battles which were fought well after Kosovo. Svetozar Koljevic, observing that poetic conventions will naturally enough be slow to develop in a migratory culture, also dates the appearance of the bugarstice about Kosovo and later battles with the Turks from the Adriatic coast in the fifteenth century, although he minimizes the Italian influence and doesn't consider that of the troubadours, stressing instead his view that epic singing had always been cultivated in the medieval Serbian courts. He argues that, with the breakdown of feudal civilization and increasingly powerful, systematic, and coordinated Turkish domination in the Balkans, the epic songs of men who had achieved a professional status in the feudal context also, as it were, broke down. This left a debris of themes, techniques, phrases, and epic formulas that were inherited by illiterate village singers who adapted them - not without a certain initial clumsiness showing where and how the metamorphosis had taken place - to the characteristic decasyllabic song accompanied by the gusle, the single-stringed instrument which became ubiquitous among peasants, shepherds, and outlaws during the late phase of Turkish rule.6 Decasyllabic songs of a lyric kind - including the so-called "women's songs" treating domestic and erotic subjects - may have been sung in villages and fields for a thousand years. The line proved ultimately to be more flexible and muscular in its handling of the epic subjects than had been the line of the bugarstice. Furthermore, it positively flourished. Although we have only about a hundred feudal bugarstice that have been preserved in written texts, there are literally thousands of the decasyllabic songs. And it is the decasyllabic songs that express most eloquently the tragedy of Kosovo.

If the traditions of the feudal bugarstice and the decasyllabic village song are undeniably interconnected, and if there is a case to be made for a connection between the bugarstice and a written literature, whether Italian, Spanish, or even French, the question of any direct relationship between the decasyllabic village singing and a written literature is still a matter of debate. Albert B. Lord in particular, arguing for the purity of the oral stream, denies any relationship at all between the two traditions in his famous study, The Singer of Tales, and declines to find much significance in the written compositions apparently modeled on oral forms by Sisko Mencetic and Dzore Drzic in the fifteenth-century or in the eighteenth-century literary epic written in a combination of prose and decasyllabic lines by Andrija Kacic-Miosic.7 Subotic, on the other hand, believes that "both currents flowed into each other: heroic songs chanted by the guslari found their way into literature, while written stories reached the guslari, who turned them into decasyllabic lines."8 Koljevic, too, believes in what he calls "the rich and fascinating interplay of literary and oral culture in the central Balkans." Taking them more seriously as evidence of reciprocity between the written and the oral traditions than does Albert Lord, Koljevic cites the poems of Dzore Drzic, and he notes that parts of Ivan Gundulic's epic Osman found their way from seventeenth-century Dubrovnik into oral poems around Kotor.9 Lord himself, in fact, acknowledges that decasyllabic passages from Kacic-Miosic's poem later "entered into the oral tradition whence they had not come."10 For our purposes, however, what needs now to be observed is the function of the decasyllabic oral song itself as a weapon in the hands of an occupied people leading to the moment of its systematic documentation and literary retrieval by Vuk Karadzic during the nineteenth century rebellion against the Turks.

III
If I were asked to produce a single image among those known to me most resonant of the suffering endured by the Christian Slavic population during the long night of Turkish rule in the Balkans, I would not hesitate a moment before choosing a scene in the third chapter of Ivo Andric's sweeping historical novel, The Bridge on the Drina.

Muhammad Sokolovic (later Sokollu), the son of a Bosnian peasant who was among the children regularly taken from their parents and borne off to Istanbul at an early age to swell the ranks of the Janissary corps or to do the work of slaves, rose to the remarkable heights of grand vizier in 1565 and governed the Turkish empire until his death in 1579. Wishing to be remembered in his homeland, he ordered the construction of the immense stone bridge across the Drina at Visegrad which resulted in years of forced labor for the inhabitants of the area and particular hardship for the members of the unconverted Christian rayah. In Andric's novel, one of the peasants pressed for labor on the bridge attempts to sabotage the work, spreading a rumor that a vila, the often malicious fairy of Balkan folklore, was destroying the bridge. Caught at night prizing cut and mortared stones into the river, he is tortured and sentenced to be impaled at the highest point of the construction work on a larded wooden stake eight feet in length and pointed at the end with iron. The slow, anatomically detailed description of the execution is an agony; one feels the shaft in one's own entrails. A Gypsy executioner hammers the stake from the anus through the man's entire body, without piercing any of the important organs, until it exits at the right shoulder by the ear. The peasant, slowly dying between noon and sunset, is placed erect on the bridge, spitted like a roasting pig on his stake. To children gathered on the riverbank, it looked as if "the strange man who hovered over the water [was] suddenly frozen in the midst of a leap. " If impaling under the Turks was about as common as crucifixion under the Romans, there is also little doubt with whom this martyred peasant in his death is meant to be compared.

Against such suffering as the impaled man is emblem of, what recourse? In the same chapter of Andric's novel, there is another scene. Exhausted men from the Christian rayah, worn down by forced labor on the bridge, sit around the dying embers of a fire in a large stable drying their wet clothes and worrying about the work that's left undone, the autumn plowing, in their villages. A recently impressed Montenegrin is among them. Taking a gusle from the pocket of his cloak, he applies resin to the string while one of the peasants stands guard outside. "All looked at the Montenegrin as if they saw him for the first time and at the gusle which seemed to disappear in his huge hands ... At last the first notes wailed out, sharp and uneven." Excitement in the stable rises. Everyone is motionless, intent now on the tale which is about to be sung.

Suddenly, after he had more or less attuned his voice to the gusle, the Montenegrin threw back his head proudly and violently so that his Adam's apple stood out in his scrawny neck and his sharp profile was outlined in the firelight, and sang in a strangled and constrained voice: A-a-a-a a-a-a-a-and then all at once in a clear and ringing tone:
The Serbian Tzar Stefan
Drank wine in fertile Prizren,
By him sat the old patriarchs,
Four of them . . .

The peasants pressed closer and closer around the singer but without making the slightest noise; their very breathing could be heard. They half closed their eyes, carried away with wonder ... The Montenegrin developed his melody more and more rapidly, even more beautiful and bolder, while the wet and sleepless workmen, carried away and insensible to all else, followed the tale as if it were their own more beautiful and more glorious destiny!"11
So it must have been by the sixteenth century in the areas which Koljevic calls "the cradle of decasyllabic village singing"12 - Bosnia, Hertzegovina, and Montenegro - where Serbian migration had carried the epic debris of the bugarstice. Many of the songs, he believes, were sung about Kosovo, though none could yet be written down under the eyes of the Turkish authorities. As Andric portrays the singing in his novel, it is somehow both an escape from pain and a stimulus to action (the sabotage on the bridge follows immediately). As if one were to think at one and the same time listening to the guslar: "Lazar is dead, and there is nothing to do but rest in the song of Tsar Stefan who ruled in glory long before the Turks," and "Lazar is dead - but let us avenge him and be free in a kingdom like Tsar Stefan's was before the Turks!", the objective conditions of history at any particular time determining which side of the contradictory response was likely in the end to predominate. One might legitimately compare the analogous power of certain American Negro spirituals simultaneously to provide consolation and assure an enslaved community that a day of reckoning would come for the oppressors. "When Israel was in Egypt's land," they sang, although in the case of the Balkans it was Egypt that was in the land of Israel.13

The day of reckoning for the Turks began in 1804 with the first Serbian uprising and coincided with the career of Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, the great linguistic reformer and collector of oral literature. Karadzic was born in 1787 in a village on the east of the Macva Plain which is itself bordered on the west by the Drina. His family, having come from Herzegovina, moved to Trsic in the Serbian hill-country on the edge of Bosnia, insuring that the future scholar would grow up not only in the region which had become the heart of decasyllabic village singing, but also where he would experience both the excitement and the cruelties of heroic life later to be sung or spoken for his dictation by Filip Visnjic, Tesan Podrugovic, and others who fought in or followed the fortunes of the revolt. Conscripted as a clerk by Djordje Curcija, a leader of the uprising in his region, Karadzic served in his undisciplined army until it was defeated in the summer of 1804 by a Turkish assault from Bosnia across the Drina into Loznica and on to Sabac. Karadzic's description of Curcija's death at the hands of men fighting under Nenadovic, another leader of the revolt who had persuaded Karadjordje that Curcija was guilty of treachery and obtained his superior's permission to have him killed, is as gruesome as anything in the bloodiest of heroic songs.14

By 1813 the first insurrection was put down by the Turks, who were only driven out of Serbia for good during the second revolt led by Milos Obrenovic beginning in 1815. Like thousands of other Serbs, Karadzic crossed into Austrian territory where, before settling in Vienna, he recorded epic poems by singers who, like himself, had fought in the rebellion. Returning to the monastery of Sisatovac in Srem province in 1814 and 1815, he systematically set about his life-long task of taking down the songs of medieval Serbia, the Battle of Kosovo, Marko Kraljevic, and the recent insurrection itself from men who had inherited the tradition of decasyllabic singing from the peasants, outlaws, border-raiders, merchants' sons, shepherds, and occasional blind visionaries living under Turkish rule. Filip Visnjic, Karadzic's most famous singer, actually personifies this last popularly stereotypical image of the guslar, while Tesan Podrugovic, who prefered to speak rather than to sing his poems, was indeed an outlaw driven into the woods for killing a Turk. Podrugovic joined the uprising in 1804 and returned to fight again when the second revolt broke out in 1815, literally in the midst of dictating poems. Most of the great songs about Marko Kraljevic in Karadzic's collection were recited by Podrugovic, and many reflect the characteristics not only of the long tradition he had inherited, but also of his own powerful personality. A unique individual talent also modifies tradition in the case of Old Milija, especially in his wonderful version of Banovic Strahinja, and perhaps also Old Rasko and Stojan the Outlaw.

There were, of course, written records of the oral poems before Karadzic began to publish systematically in 1814. Single bugarstice had been written down as early as 1555 and, by 1720, the Erlangen Manuscript had recorded decasyllabic heroic poems. Alberto Fortis's Italian Travels in Dalmatia, containing The Wife of Asan-aga both in the original and in Italian translation, followed in 1774, reaching Goethe whose German version, Klaggesang von der edlen Frauen des Asan Aga, appeared in Herder's Folksongs in 1778 and drew the attention of poets and intellectuals all over Europe to the Serbian oral tradition. Karadzic's work as a collector, however, coinciding with a nationalist revolt and with the enthusiasm of the Romantic movement for folk poetry of all kinds, and reinforced by his reformation of the Serbian language itself based on the conviction that Serbian should be written as it was spoken by the people and preserved in the people's poetry, made an unprecedented and lasting impact. Support in the enterprise came at once from the deeply influential Jacob Grimm, and later from a wide range of poets, critics, and translators including Goethe, "Talvj" (Therese Albertina Louisa von Jacob), Wilhelm Gerhard, Sir John Bowring, Adam Mickiewicz, V. G. Belinsky, and Alexander Pushkin (who, along with translating some of Karadzic's actual texts, was deceived by Prosper MИrimИe's synthetic confection called La Guzla). Karadzic himself, busy with other projects, often lacking money, and crippled by a mysterious withered leg that required the use both of a wooden attachment and a crutch, traveled for years throughout Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and the Adriatic coast recording for posterity both epic and lyrical oral poems. Not until 1862 was the definitive four-volume Viennese edition of Serbian Folk Poems complete. Although there have been other collections since, none has replaced it.

Like virtually all other serious translators of the Kosovo poems, we have used the versions collected by Vuk Karadzic. Interestingly, only one of our selections from Karadzic's second volume containing decasyllabic poems about Kosovo, its anticipation and its aftermath, was taken down from one of his most famous singers - Podrugovic's Tsar Lazar and Tsaritsa Militsa. Along with the five eloquent fragments dictated to Karadzic by his father and an unknown singer's version of Music Stefan, several of the best known poems - The Downfall of the Kingdom of Serbia, Tsaritsa Militsa and Vladeta the Voyvoda, The Kosovo Maiden, the post-Kosovo Death of Duke Prijezda and probably also an unknown singer's The Death of the Mother of the Jugovici - were written down from the memorized recitations of old blind women, some of them associated with monasteries in Srem. It is difficult to know what to make of this. Before Karadzic's time, these songs, or versions of them, doubtless would have been sung to the gusle by male singers such as Filip Visnjic. It is hard to know when and how the old women became custodians of several of the greatest epic poems in the tradition. Koljevic calls the part they play "a completely different story . . which is not usually fully recognized" and finds their greatest contribution to be "their sense of the distant past [which] seems to be stronger and sometimes more accurate than that of other singers."15 But the old women were not, in fact, singers. Nor was Karadzic's father. Nor even, technically, was Podrugovic when he spoke his poems. We have arrived, therefore, at a point where it is necessary to say a few words about the technique of oral poetry and about what happens when an oral poem is dictated, written down as a fixed text, and translated into another language - in our case English.

IV
Most American and British readers who are acquainted with the tradition of decasyllabic epic poetry know it from the work of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord culminating in Lord's The Singer of Tales, the Harvard collection of Serbocroatian Heroic Songs taken down by modern recording techniques, and Bela Bartok's musical transcriptions of the actual singing and playing of the gusle. Although Karadzic often stressed that the poems of his singers were improvised rather than memorized, it required the work of Parry and Lord to demonstrate in technical terms the manner in which an apprentice singer slowly learned a full vocabulary of epic formulas and phrases in terms of which he would create orally a poem which he had learned orally in the act of oral performance. In his chapter on "Writing and Oral Tradition," Lord likens the act of writing down an oral poem to photographing Proteus; a particular version is artifically preserved while the song itself continues to change its shape in subsequent performances.16 Podrugovic's version of Tsar Lazar and Tsaritsa Militsa would have been different in some respects on Wednesday from the version he dictated to Karadzic on Tuesday, although there also would have been many stable elements - runs of lines, and of course the epic formulas themselves - remaining intact from one performance to another. And yet even by Karadzic's time, the fluidity of the oral tradition had begun in some ways to harden; Podrugovic himself no longer sang but spoke his poems, and the Kosovo tales dictated by the old blind women sitting in the shade of monasteries had been memorized word for word - like Paternoster, as S. Radojcic has remarked.17

This introduction is not the place to take up in detail the Parry-Lord theory of oral composition or the recent chapters in the debate it has generated.18 It is enough that the reader understand that, in the case of each poem, he is reading a written English version of a written Serbo-Croatian version of an oral poem which, in the hands of another singer, or in earlier times, or in the hands of the same singer (with the exception of the old women) at a later time, would have been differently performed in certain significant respects.

Looking at a printed text in the absence of actual singing to the gusle, the translator is confronting a verbal rhythm which is insistently trochaic. Each pentameter line, moreover, is invariably end-stopped, and there is always a caesura pause after the fourth syllable. Between them, Lord and Bartok have shown how subtle and flexible this line becomes through an interplay of melody and text in actual performance. Accents are not stressed with equal intensity, iambs and dactyls may be imposed and extra syllables supplied by words without meaning. The last syllable is often distorted or swallowed, and the penultimate is inclined to become the most prominent; further, the singer does not usually observe the caesura (although its existence is very real to him)." Written down in cold print, however, the line to be translated is somewhat distressingly regular:

Podi/ze se// Crno/jevic/Ivo.

Predictably enough, different translators have dealt with the line in different ways, and solutions range from attempts to write English trochaic pentameter without making the heroic poems sound like The Song of Hiawatha, to imitations of William Morris's meter in his translation of Sigurd the Volsung, simple syllable-counting, prose that respects the integrity of each line and attempts to achieve occasional rhythmical effects, and prose printed in paragraphs.20 Our own solution has been to break the original line into halflines, vary the position of the caesura (to coincide with the line breaks, which in fact sometimes make for only a visual pause in reading), and strive for a flexible and melodious iambic rhythm. I don't think there is any getting away from the fact that it is pretty much only the iambic pentameter that is capable of expressing traditional heroic emotions in English. (Even Christopher Logue's Homer is often heavily iambic.) We do use fragments of trochaic meter when possible in a dominantly iambic context, but we do not at any point attempt to reproduce a strict decasyllabic line. Although we cannot provide on the page the rhythmic subtleties that an actual oral performance accompanied by the gusle would make manifest, we are able to strive, at any rate, for variety and flexibility within a norm. Again, we do not use a strict syllable count in our line, and we do not always end-stop. The line length varies from four to seven feet; the norm is five. The pause at the line break varies from long, to short, to merely visual.

If this approach proves to be controversial among purists, I suspect that other decisions which we have made along the way will be even more so. I will note just three more possible issues here and relegate the rest to a footnote. (1) We call the Serbian Tsar both Lazar and Lazarus, depending upon rhythmical considerations. Although rather odd on the face of it, I think this works out perfectly satisfactorily in practice. It amounts to treating the name as if it could be inflected in English (which it can be and is in Serbo-Croat). (2) It is characteristic of these poems for the tense to shift back and forth from past to historic present somewhat in the manner of the Poema del Cid.21 We follow the original changes of tense in our translation only when the effect of doing so is interesting or meaningful in English and never when it is merely conventional or might create confusion. (3) We now and then use Serbian and English titles interchangeably. The "Tsar" is also called "Prince" and "Lord." A "knight" may well walk into a poem and a "voyvoda" or a "duke" walk out of it.22 But at this point I should stop saying "we" and say "I." My collaborator, who has been gratifyingly forbearing throughout our several years of work together, is not responsible for some of the more radical liberties taken with some of our texts. It would take far too much space to explain and defend all of these, and I hope it will not seem disingenuous to say that it was in fact the tradition of oral composition and improvisation itself that made me feel free to add occasional lines and epic formulas of my own, eliminate others, lengthen and shorten lines, and even leave untranslated the uninteresting conclusions of The Downfall of the Kingdom of Serbia and Marko Kraljevic and the Eagle. (This last, I know, is not properly speaking a Kosovo poem; but I want to include it as a transition to the next major cycle and a promise to myself to keep working.) I have also been perfectly willing to borrow phrases and diction from other translators when neither I nor my collaborator could think of anything better. These small acts of plagiarism, too, seem to me perfectly consistent with a tradition which does not conceive of or reward originality according to the terms in which we have come to understand it.

For Vuckovic, the Kosovo poems exist, as they do for Andric, Popa, Lalic, and Pavlovic, as part of a tradition which he himself continues in his work. There is an irony and sadness in his poems which is difficult to render in English, but which, I think, provides a usefully provocative contrast to Andric's vision of the guslar quoted earlier from the pages of The Bridge on the Drina. His long poem about Serbian mythology and history is written both in verse and prose This is part of the conclusion to section one:

"What Serbs remained got up from the plain and counted each other and called out, but nobody got any answers. No one came to help them, and so the Turkish Power passed the border of the First Dimension. After a while there remained almost nothing at all: dust and ashes, vain repentance, late remorse, and the heavy blackness of total defeat.

The Serbs quieted down, but they did not shut their mouths. Idled by the time on their hands they started to sing and sang themselves hoarse in endless poems accompanied by the mourning sounds of the sobbing gusle. The blind guslars gazed into the future, and those who could see covered themselves out of shame and became the leaders of the blind But what kind of music is this, my poor soul, reduced to just one string!"

LillyNomad

[Lilly]

Fates as dark as those of Lazarus
And Milosh Obilich sung down centuries
Of Turkish occupation by dusty peasant guslars
Who didn't need to know that fancy alphabet
Saint Cyril left behind in which reforming Vuk
Spelled out phonetically a living language
Where one itches through the final syllables of names
And scratches at the surface of a destiny
In verbal fragments of a people's epic past.
How unlikely, Vladeta, that we should meet at all.
In 1941 beside a silly field
Of vegetables that noncombatant types
Were urged to cultivate- officially they called
Such doubtful husbandry a "Victory Garden"-
You at just eighteen had taken to the hills
With Tito's Partisans where every urgent message
Sent to Stalin (later on to Churchill)
Was the same: More Boots!
The rugged karst that cut away your soles
Kept "the occupier" as the euphemistic
Tour books call him now (for, after all, he's rich)
An easy target in the villages & towns.
Did you swoop right down on him like Marko on the Turks?
You did- but couldn't live with
Certain knowledge of unspeakable reprisals.
Nazi mathematics was a good deal easier
To follow than your theory of recursive functions
Hammered out in hiding six months later in Vienna-
For every officer you blew up in the town
They shot a hundred villagers.
And who is more within his rights
To moralize on firing squads than someone who himself
Would stand before one-
Trying you summarily, your
Brothers tied you to a tree and lined up in a nasty file
With leveled rifles aimed to blow your very useful brains
To far less squeamish hills.
You can laugh four decades later since you've lived to tell
The tale: "But my uncle, who as fate
Would have it, is in charge of this grim liquidation,
Couldn't shoot his nephew.
That was 1941; two years later
And he would have."
He cut you loose and kicked
You in the ass and shouted: run!


In the ballad, Vladeta survives to tell the queen
What he saw at Kosovo: "Tell me knight," she says,
"When you were on that wide and level plain
Did you see great Lazar riding by?
Did you see my father and my noble brothers there?
Did you see the husbands of my daughters?"
And Vladeta must tell of slaughter and betrayal
-the guslar singing mournfully in lines of just
Ten syllables, sliding over pauses at the fourth
Where prosodists would quickly place
Twin horizontal lines- Yes, Vladeta must tell
The queen exactly what annihilation feels like.
That I see you sometimes standing among memories
Like this other Vladeta before the queen
Or Mestrovich among his early works
Or even like Lord Milosh on that open plain
You find, of course, unspeakably absurd-
"With my broken battle-lance, no doubt,
As all the enemy press in upon me fighting
Near the river Sitnitsa. One account says Milosh
Killed twelve thousand Turkish soldiers after
He had polished off the Sultan. In fact they
Took him in the tent and cut off both his arms!"
you open up me slivovitz and go on with your tales
Which, my friend, for all the jokes and ironies
Required for the telling never cease to bleed-
And in your cups you sing to me Prince Lazar's fatal choice,

You sing the ancient downfall of the Serbs.
"Which Kingdom is it that you long for most?
That's the question that the falcon asked the Tsar.
If you choose the earth, he said then saddle horses,
Tighten girths- have your knights put on
Their swords and make a dawn attack against
The Turks: your enemy will be destroyed.
But if you choose the skies then build a church-
O not of stone but out of silk and velvet-
Gather up your forces, take the bread and wine,
For all shall perish, perish utterly,
And you, O Tsar, shall perish with them. "
As you break your words for our inadequate exchange
And give me phrases which in token of their real worth
I give you back in scribbled & devalued English notes
I hear you choose the earth even as you tell me otherwise
And laughingly declare: the skies, the skies!
For you are out there on that wide & level plain;
You see yourself great Lazar riding by;
You see the father of the Lady's brothers there;
You see the husbands of her daughters-
And when your uncle cuts you loose
You stumble through the villages & hills
Playing tokens for survival, whispering
In code to border guards & agents, prostitutes & poets,
Fellow travelers and their wealthy following
Of contraband tobacconists an anagram compounded
Of the talismanic words that wound the clocks
In old Ragusa: OBLITI PRIVATORUM PUBLICA CURATE-
Forget your private business
And concern yourself with public life, that's
The gist of it- knowing well that only those
A man can trust will whisper the correct response.
For if a man's a friend he knows that underneath
Those proudly chiseled words above the lintel close beside
The Rector's palace there's a dusty little shop
Whose owner chalks (in lingua franca too!)
Upon a blackboard hanging in his narrow window
The reply: ANYTIME FRIED FISHES.
And that's the phrase, you tell me, answers Latin.
That's the phrase that took you underground!
Obliti Privatorum Publica Curate you intone, and I cry out:
Anytime Fried Fishes! and we hug each other like
Two drunken Slavs and weep like sentimental
Irishmen & leave our empty bottle on the pedestal
Of Mestrovich's well.
Vladeta, my Voyvoda, my dear unhappy friend,
There is no Kingdom left for us to choose-
Neither of the earth nor of the sky
But peace, peace, to all who wander
For whatever reason from their stony lands
Bringing all the heavy cargo of their legends
Humming in a cipher in their lucid, spinning minds!

LillyNomad