There had already been a
rumour among the literati of Europe, for more than fifty years, of the
beauty and singularity of the Illyrian national songs, founded mostly
on the communications of Italian travellers and the citations of
Dalmatian dictionaries. Herder, in his valuable Collection of popular
Poetry, gave two historical fragments from the work of a Dalmatian
clergyman, A. Cacich.[12] Goethe also has a beautiful tale, taken from
Abbate Fortis' Travels among the Morlachians. Both translated by means
of the French; and although this double translation could not possibly
do justice to the originals, they were sufficiently admired. But when
Vuk's collection appeared, and a part of its contents was made
intelligible to the civilized world by a translation attempted by the
author of this work, imperfect and deficient as any translation of
popular poetry must necessarily ever be, the public and the critics
were nevertheless alike struck with the strong expression of the high
and incomparable beauties of nature. All that the other Slavic
nations, or the Germans, the Scotch, and the Spaniards, possess of
popular poetry, can at the utmost be compared with the lyrical part of
the Servian songs, called by them _female_ songs, because they are
sung only by females and youths; but the long epic extemporized
compositions, by which a peasant bard, sitting in a large circle of
other peasants, in unpremeditated but perfectly regular and harmonious
verse, celebrates the heroic deeds of their ancestors or
cotemporaries, has no parallel in the whole history of literature
since the days of Homer.
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