[Gutenberg 39028] • Servian Popular Poetry

Stephanovich Karadjich Vuk was born on the 26th October, O. S., in the year 1787, at Trshich, an obscure village in Turkish Servia (Iadar), a short distance from the Austrian and Hungarian frontier. In his early youth he passed the borders, and received his education at the Gymnasium of the dissidents from the Greek church at Karlovitz. He began his literary career at Vienna, and published in 1814 his Servian Grammar, and a century of Servian songs; but Imperial censorship induced him to seek a freer field for the publication of his works, and he removed to Leipzig, where the edition, in three volumes, of his popular Servian poetry, appeared in 1823–4.

The poetry of Servia was wholly traditional, until the nineteenth century. It had never found a pen to record it, but has been preserved by the people, and principally by those of the lower classes, who had been accustomed to listen and to sing these interesting compositions to the sound of a simple three-stringed instrument, called a Gusle.

The collection of popular songs, Narodne srpske pjesme, from which most of those which occupy this volume are taken, was made by Vuk, and committed to paper either from early recollections, or from the repetition of Servian minstrels.