Page:The Ballads of Marko Kraljević.djvu/28

 songs, including "The Wife of Hassan Aga." It is an admirable work. The introduction, the notes and the translations are sound and reliable, and as an introduction to the subject, it is the most generally useful book that has appeared since Talvj.

Two years later, we find in Owen Meredith's Serbski Pesme, National Songs of Servia, another attempt to interpret Serbian folk-song to Englishmen. Regarded as poetry, these versions are on a much higher level than Bowring's, but the author allowed himself much greater liberty of treatment. As he says himself, "no attempt has been made at accurate verbal translation from the original language. They cannot, indeed, be called translations in the strict sense of the word. What they are, let the reader decide." The first seventy-five pages are devoted to a spirited rendering of the Kossovo ballads and the second half of the book consists of "Popular or Domestic Pesmas" among which is to be found once more "The Wife of Hassan Aga ."

The wide attention that had been given to Serbian literature was part of the universal romantic movement. But it was no longer new. Foreign interest had reached its high-water mark and was now failing rapidly. Writing in 1905, Dr Ćurčin deplored the fact that Germans knew less about Serbian literature