Servian Popular Poetry — Context and Discussion

The Vila as Messenger of Fate

The vila—a supernatural female figure of Slavic folklore—appears in the Marko excerpt as a direct, almost sisterly interlocutor. She calls him 'Brother' and reveals that his horse stumbled not from weariness but from foreknowledge of Marko's death. Her speech is blunt: 'God will smite thee—God, the old blood-shedder.' This personification of fate is not a distant oracle but a voice from the mountain, intimately tied to the landscape.

Bowring's translation renders her as 'white Vila,' a term left untranslated, preserving the foreignness of the figure. Her role is to guide Marko toward self-knowledge: she instructs him to look into a fountain 'as if the fountain were a mirror' to see his death-day. The vila thus functions as a narrative device that compels the hero to confront mortality, while also grounding the supernatural in the physical world of Urvina mountain.

Marko's Ritual Destruction of His Own Legend

Upon learning of his impending death, Marko does not seek to avoid it. Instead, he systematically dismantles the symbols of his heroic identity. He first kills Sharaz, his loyal horse, 'that he never should by Turk be mounted.' Then he breaks his sabre into four pieces, his lance into seven, and hurls his club into the 'azure, gloomy ocean.' Each act is accompanied by a stated reason: to prevent Turkish desecration or to ensure no future hero can claim his weapons.

This ritual destruction is a form of self-memorializing that controls how his legacy will be remembered. By writing a letter that specifies the disposal of his three purses—one for his grave-digger, one for the church, one for the blind and maimed—Marko scripts his own posthumous narrative. The poem thus becomes a meditation on how a hero manages his own myth, ensuring that even in death he dictates the terms of remembrance.

Bowring's Translational Choices and Their Effects

Bowring's translation, published in 1827, adopts a deliberately archaic English register. He uses contractions like 'o'er' and 'ere,' and inversions such as 'Better steed ne'er trod the earth than Sharaz.' This stylistic choice distances the poems from contemporary speech, lending them a ballad-like quality. However, Bowring also retains Serbian proper nouns—Sharaz, Vila, Urvina—without anglicization, preserving a sense of cultural specificity.

The verse is unrhymed, which allows the translator to follow the original's line structure more closely. Yet the meter is irregular, sometimes slipping into iambic rhythms. Bowring's introduction reveals his awareness of the difficulty: he notes that 'the original meaning of the word Srb it is not easy to fix,' showing a scholarly caution that contrasts with the poetic license of the translations themselves. Readers should attend to these tensions between fidelity and fluency.

This edition offers a window into a poetic tradition where the heroic and the supernatural coexist without irony. Readers may find it useful to read the poems aloud to catch the rhythm of the deseterac, and to note how Bowring's footnotes occasionally clarify cultural references. The collection rewards attention to recurring motifs—fountains, fir-trees, the number three—that structure the oral narratives. Approach these poems as performances preserved in print, shaped by both the Serbian singers and their English translator.

There’s something about those old songs—Serbian heroes falling under a vila’s spell, or Elizabethan lovers trading quiet vows—that stays with you long after the page closes. I kept thinking of Prince Marko’s weary fate while reading Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age — A Reader’s Guide. Both voices feel so human, so close, like a friend remembering a life they almost lived.