tongue—thus giving it an ideal phonetic orthography, and establishing the golden rule, “Spell as you speak and speak as you spell.”3 He also travelled from one village to another throughout Serbia, zealously collecting and inscribing the epic and lyric poems, legends, and traditions as he heard them from the lips of bards and story-tellers, professional and amateur.

In his endeavours he was powerfully seconded by the Serbian ruling princes, and he had the good fortune to acquire the intimate friendship of those distinguished philologers and scientists of the last century, Bartholemy Kopitar, Schaffarik, and Grimm. Helped by Kopitar, Karadgitch succeeded in compiling an academic dictionary of the Serbian language interpreted by Latin and German equivalents. This remains to this day the only reliable Serbian dictionary approaching to the Western standard of such books. His first collection of Serbian popular poems was published in Vienna in 1814. It contained 200 lyric songs, which he called zenske pyesme (i.e. ‘women-songs’), and 23 heroic ballads, and the book created a stir in literary circles in Austria, Serbia, Germany, Russia, and other countries. Seven years later Karadgitch published at Leipzig a second edition in three books. This contained 406 lyric songs and 117 heroic poems. From this edition Sir John Bowring made his metrical translation of certain of the lyric and epic poems, which he published in 1827 under the title Servian Popular Poetry. He dedicated the book to Karadgitch, who was his intimate friend and teacher of Serbian.

I have reproduced three of Bowring’s ballads in this book that English readers may have a better idea than they can obtain from a mere prose rendering of the original verse. As to the poetic merits of these metrical translations I will not presume to offer an opinion, but I may be permitted to say that I have not seen a more faithful translation of our national ballads and lyric songs in English or in any other language. Considering the difficulties to the Anglo-Saxon student of any Slavonic language (more especially Serbian) it is surprising that there should be so few defects in Bowring’s work. Sir John must have possessed an uncommon gift for acquiring languages, as he has also translated from each of the other Slavonic tongues with—so I am informed—similar accuracy and precision.

The third edition of Karadgitch’s work appeared in Vienna at intervals between the years 1841 and 1866. It had now grown to five volumes and contained 1112 lyric songs and 313 heroic ballads. It is from this edition that I have selected the hero-tales in this book; and if I should succeed in interesting a new generation of English readers in the literature of my country it will be my further ambition to attempt the immeasurably harder task of introducing them in a subsequent volume to our popular lyric poetry.

It remains only to tender my most grateful acknowledgment to my esteemed friend M. Chedo Miyatovich for his invaluable advice and encouragement, and for his generous willingness to contribute the preface which adorns my book.

W. M. P.