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Lied und populre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture 52 (2007)

SPANISH BALLADS INJOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDERSVOLKSLIEDERCOLLECTION (1778/79), JAKOB GRIMMS

SILVA DE ROMANCES VIEJOSCOLLECTION (1815)AND

THEIRINTERCULTURAL ECHOES IN CROATIA*

SIMONADELI

1. Introduction

Extensive literature exists on the links between Herder and the study of oral po-etry; however, it would seem that the theme still remains inexhaustible, constantlyopening up new horizons on possible contexts of study about Herder and folk-lorism (midchens 1999), nationalism (Bohlman 2004), anticolonial universalism,

etc.1

We have touched on these themes to the extent that the Volksliedercollectionaccording to V. Schirmunski,represents the first step in the comparative study ofstyle and plot (Schirmunski 1963: 64) of narrative poetry and, for the first timeaccording to B. Dakula (Dakula 1968), confronts the Spanish romances and theMorlach ballads.2

There are diverse opinions in the context of the Croatian scholarship on litera-ture concerning the influence of Herder and his literary practice on the poetryopus of Croatian writers. Thus, for example, Viktor mega writes: Croatian re-ception of Herders creativity has not been adequate, although his name has oftenbeen mentioned and is still referred to (in literary histories) whenever what is inquestion are the echoes ofHasanaginica which, in Goethes recasting, based on the

* English by Nina Antoljak.1 Andreas Poltermann wrote about Herders anticolonial universalism in 1997. The mani-

fold and diverse connections between Croatian poetry and German poetry during thepre-Romantic and Romantic periods, and with that segment that relates to the receptionof the German literary ballads, was widely discussed in M. Gavrins 1970 study.

2 This article represents an adapted chapter from my doctoral dissertation on the style andplot of the Spanish romance and Croatian ballads in oral tradition (Deli 2004).


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Italian, he included in his anthology []. Certain original poems were translatedinto Croatian, these being atypical texts, while the occasional journalistic reviews

on the two best-known works referred to were based, of course, on knowledge ofthe original. At the time of the authors widest popularity, during the epoch ofLate Enlightenment and Romanticism, there were no fully adequate conditions inCroatia for comprehensive reception, while later, in the age of positivistic scienceand Naturalism, it was considered that the historiosophic works of the XVIIIthcentury were obsolete. It is certainly unusual that Herder particularly, who wasextolled in the Slavic East as a promoter of Slavism, and of harmony between na-tions in general, experienced such a weak response in Croatia.3 Folklorists, on theother hand, evaluate the influence of Herders thought as having been much moresignificant (Cf. Bokovi-Stulli 1978).

In the segment that is related to the knowledge of the original of one ofHerders most popular works (mega ibid.), the Volksliedercollection, we wishto direct attention in this article to the poetry opus of Stanko Vraz (18101851).4It seems to us that this poet interiorised certain of Herders postulates and views onoral literature. Apart from that, with the influence of his poetry opus on later gen-erations and scholars, he initiated the tradition of the use of a particular literaryterm the LITERARY ROMANCE (Petrovi 1972) that was popular in 19th century

Croatian literature, and, later, also the ORAL LITERARY ROMANCE (Petrovi ibid.).We will not be dealing in this article with aspects of the intertextual links and in-fluences of Herder on Vrazs poetry opus, but we will point out certain parallels inthe concept of Herders and Vrazs anthology. However, our core intention is torefer to certain similarities, and also differences, in some of the translating solutionsbetween Vrazs translations of Spanish romances in his poetry collection, Glasi izdubrave eravinske [Voices from the erava Woods] (1841, 21864) and Herderstranslations of Spanish romances, found in his famous Volkslieder collection

(1778/79), which have been comprehensively examined in literature. Apart fromthat, Vrazs translations of Spanish romances initiated the fairly infrequent practiceof translating the romances into Croatian, and also, indirectly, the formation of a

3 Viktor mega, the entry on Herder in the Hrvatska knjievna enciklopedija (CroatianLiterary Encyclopaedia) [in print]. I am grateful to Mr Velimir Viskovi, the editor-in-chief of this edition, for his permission to cite this text, as well as other entries preparedfor the afore mentioned encyclopaedia,previously unreleased.

4 A Slovene by birth, he wrote part of his poems in Slovenian, while the major part of his

opus was written in the Croatian language. He was a member of the Croatian NationalRevival, the so-called Illyrian movement, inspired by Southern Slavic ideas.


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particular type of ethnographic discourse that persisted into the 20th century andright up until today, whose starting-point is the culturological similarity between

Croatian and Spanish romances and ballads (Miletich 1981).

2. The anthological plot in Volksliederand Vrazs Glasi iz dubrave eravin-ske

We are wondering whether the parallelism we see between the title of Vrazs poetrycollection (1841, 21862) and that of Herders Stimmen der Vlker in Liedern collec-tion in Johann von Mllers posthumous edition (1807) may not be a case of merecoincidence. The title of Vrazs collection could be a culturological translation ofMllers, while this is a similar type of translation to those we can identify inVrazs other translation work, and also in the recasting of the Spanish ballads.

Apart from that, it does seem that another key work of German Romanticism andthe discovery of Spanish folk poetry in German culture are intertwined into theintertextual reference of Vrazs collection title. Here, we are thinking of JakobGrimms Silva de romances viejos (1815), which is known to have been in Vrazspossession and to have been read by him in the original (Kesteranek 1917: 584).5It is possible that this may also have inspired Vraz to give his collection the Glasi iz

dubrave eravinske title, where dubrava (nom.) (that is, woods or forest) corre-sponds with silva, also woods etymologically, although silva can also mean apoetry collection of various content and themes, written without method andorder.6 It is probable that Vraz adopted from that collection the originals of thefour ballads he translated for his collection ballads known under the titles El pri-sionero, Bovalas el pagano, Conde Arnaldos, or by the initial verse Yo me levantarami madre(Kesteranek 1917) two of which were included in the Glasi iz dubraveeravinskecollection, and two in the Gusle i tambura7collection. And perhaps it is

5 Vrazs copy of Grimms book, known to have been brought to him from Vienna at thepoets request by the writer V. Babuki in 1840, is kept in the National University Li-brary in Zagreb (Ibid.). The manuscripts of Vrazs notebooks are kept at the same loca-tion; they contain his handwritten exercises in Spanish language and these are interestingmaterial for Hispanic Studies, since they show that Vraz did not confine himself merelyto passive reading of Spanish literature.

6 Cf. http://buscon.rae.es/ drael/SrvltConsulta?TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=silva. Diccionariode la lengua espaola Vigsima segunda edicin < 05/10/2007> .

7 B. Dakula provides information that Vraz translated another ballad into Croatian (Yo me

era mora moraima), which remained in manuscript form. In addition, Vraz cites versesfrom two additional ballads: Rosa fresca, rosa fresca and A fuera, a fuera Rodrigo (Vraz


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that particular intertextual reference to Grimm who, among other, recognisedthe similarity between Spanish and Southern Slavic oral poetry (Miletich 1981)8 in

his study of the literature of the Southern Slavs that one can thank for the found-ing a specific type of ethnographic discourse in Croatia. That type of discoursewould also be enlivened in Croatia during the XXth century, founded on the rec-ognition of the typological and culturological similarities between Croatian andSpanish poetry (Cf. Miletich 1981).9

If it were to be correct that we could also identify in the Vraz collection titlethe intertextual reference to Mllers title of the Herder collection, then we couldsay that Vrazs anthology and its hybrid concept is indebted to the similar conceptof Herders anthological plot (Cf. Suphan 1871). Under that term, we compre-hend that view of the collection as a specific form of poetry discourse which, dueto its composition at least as is suggested to us from the reading of Suphans in-terpretation of the collection is comparable even with the narrative literary gen-res. It opens with a German folk poem and concludes with a German artisticpoem, while the interspace between the initial and final points of the anthology isgiven over to poems, folk, but both popular and artistic poems, from the most di-verse European and extra-European nations. The Vraz anthology includes recast-ings from Slovenian, Polish, Czech, German and Spanish oral and artistic poetry,

in addition to the authors own poetry compositions. However, Vrazs anthology iscloser to Herders concept of an anthology than to Mllers mode of classifyingpoems. Herder does not rely on ethnological classification of poems as is found in

J. von Mllers 1807 edition (Suphan 1871). If we follow B. Suphans line ofthinking, the anthological plot of Herders collection consists of juxtapositioningand interweaving of the poems of different peoples, so that one poem announcesthe next, which adopts and develops the motif of the foregoing poem, or, on itspart, contrasts to it a theme with a converse denominator (Suphan 1871). Repeti-

tion is a process that enables one to notice the parallelism between neighbouringpoems and to follow the narrative plot. Customary poetic themes of love anddeath along with family relations dominate as well as poems with a prevailing ele-

1841: 132133), and the verses of a Spanish ballad (El amor que nunca cesa) appear as amotto in the Glasi iz dubrave erovinske collection. (Cf. Dakula 1968: 408).

8 See Maja Bokovi-Stullis entry in the Hrvatska knjievna enciklopedija (Croatian Liter-ary Encyclopaedia) [in print] on reception of Jakob Grimm in Croatia. Naturally enough,Vraz was also influenced by poets from the Slavic cultural circle (e.g. Mickiewicz) in addi-

tion to Grimm and Herder. See Dakula 1968 on Vrazs rich literary culture.9 We wrote in articles 1999; 2000, about certain aspects of that ethnographic discourse.


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giac atmosphere, while the arranged order tries to vary the poems in length, metricmood and lyrical subject type (Cf. Herder 1975).

A certain analogy can be noticed in that anthological plot, powerfully perme-ated with the Enlightenment ideology of idealistic universalism (Poltermann1999), between the positions taken in Herders Volksliederby the much more nu-merous recastings of Spanish romances10 and by the sole four Croatian songs11(that is, Morlach songs, as both Herder and Fortis called them). In that segmentof the anthology that tries to present VOLKSGEIST (folk spirit) and NATIONAL-CHARACTER (national character) in the Enlightenment spirit on the basis of thetranslated poems, Herders translations present Spanish romances and Morlachballads as poetry conceived in those cultural regions in which the cultures of theEast and the West interlace, due to the fact that the poems largely deal with Moor-ish or Turkish themes (Cf. Deli 2004).

Apart from that, the fact is that Herder naturalised the words of Orientalethymology from the Spanish romances of Gins Prez de Hita, words that werenot usually found in Spanish traditional poetry discourse. Admittedly, he did thisonly where Arabisms were not customary in traditional poetry.12 Nonetheless, that

10 The selection of 12 romances among the 36 poems that the cobbler from Murcia, Gins

Prez de Hita, included in his work entitled Historia de los bandos de Zegres y Abencerrajes(Zaragoza 1595, Cuenca 1619) shows that the German scholar gave priority to Moorishromances with sentimental themes. It is interesting to note that Herder did not select oldSpanish ballads familiar to him from various ROMANCEROS, which he could consult inGerman libraries. He mentioned them in letters sent to Gleim, in which he asked thepoet to send him the Cancionero Generaland Gngoras romances, clearly showing thathe had access to the Cancionero de Romances from Amberes (Cf. Zimmermann1997: 414). He changed his preference in the second volume and selected a song by GilPolo and a Gngora ballad: Qu se nos va la Pascua, mozas, qu se nos va la Pascua!; So-bre unas altas rocas; Oh, cun bien que acusa Alcino,/ Orfeo de Guadiana! (Cf. Gngora1985: 119122; 276277; 291295).

11 These are Asanaginica (Fortis I 1774: 97), Pisma od Sekule, Jankova netjaka, DivojkeDragomana i paeMustaj-bega (Kai 1988: 422426), Pisma od Radoslava (ibid.: 164167) and Pisma od Kobilia i VukaBrankovia (ibid.: 222227). In the German translati-on: Ein Gesang von Milos Cobilich und Vuko Brankowich (Herder 1975:67-72), Klaggesangvon der edlen Frauen des Asan-Aga Herder (1975:158-161). RadoslausHerder (1975:283-286). Die schne Dolmetscherin Herder (1975:287-290).

12 Thus, for example, while Abenmar lies there listlessly grieving because of his unrequitedlove for Galiana, the romance En las huertas de Almera described his lack of spirit in the

verses Por arrimo su albornoz/ y por alfombra su adarga (Prez de Hita I 1913: 36).Herder translates that by exoticisms, clearly defining the Oriental ambience: Statt des


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Oriental discourse was inserted in such a context that decolonised the Orientalaura of those poems. Thus, for example, the Spanish romances that appear in

small sections of 2 or 4 romances, have the function of directing attention to thevariability of folk poetry also within an individual tradition, and not merely in thecomparative context, since the same protagonists appear regularly throughout thediverse romances. If we continue to follow the logic of Suphans thought, theCroatian balladAsan-aginica, which is the last poem in the first part of the anthol-ogy, was given the role of connecting the motifs that appeared in its immediatevicinity in the artistic texts, and those in the fragments from Shakespeare. Addi-tionally, in his collection, Herder, similarly to Thomas Percy in Reliques of AncientEnglish Poetry (Percy 1847), used the genre terms BALLADE and ROMANZE assynonyms, arranging poems successivly that he denoted by these literary terms. Soit could be said that both Herders Spanish romances and the Morlach ballads,despite their Oriental themes, were a component part of the concept of the par-ticularistic universalism collection.

ROMANZE is a literary genre suitable, alongside with the travel writing litera-ture, according to Ch. v. Zimmermann, for the study of the image of Spain in

XVIIIth century German literature (Cf. Zimmermann 1997). For its part, whenthe XIXth century is in question when the romance genre confirmed in Croatia, it

could be said that romances emerged as a genre which was linked to the scholarlyimage attributed to Spain and to the South generally, supplanting earlier stereo-types.13 So it seems to us that the Croatian literary term ROMANCA is a child ofthe Enlightenment and the scholarly concept of Spanish culture.

Vraz classified his collection into two parts: a group of 21 b a l l a d s and agroup of 4 r o m a n c e s , adopting Herders view that these were poems of the

Kissens sein Al b o r n o s ,/ seine Tartsche statt des Teppichs (Herder 1975: 46). He alsotransposes other words by which he manages to recast the local colour of the original:

when the good Sayavedra from the Ro verde, ro verderomance tries to flee from thebattle, with Renegado (Renegade) pursuing him (Prez de Hita I 1913: 312), Herdertranslates that with a cultural borrowed word: Hinter ihm ein Renegate (Herder1975: 129). Still, it is only in exceptional circumstances that he introduces Orientalisms

where they were otherwise absent in the original (Cf. Herder 1975: 35. Cf. Deli 2004).13 According to Wolfgang Kayser, the Black Legend about Spain was very influential dur-

ing the Enlightenment period. The key words describing the criticism devoted by Europeto Spain were: the Inquisition, a country lacking political and cultural power; and, Spainas a coloniser of countries (but not as a country that discovers the New World). The

dominating human types were the fanatic priest, the grasping Conquistador, haughty no-bility and gentlefolk, and vagabonds (Cf. Kayser 1945: 11 et al.).


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same genre. Vraz was aware that there were diverse interpretations of these genres.As he wrote in the afterword to his collection, some of those genres differ by the

type of event being narrated. Thus, the ballad would recount heroic, intense,and entangled events, while the romance would give a playful account of fe-male, gentle and simple events. Generally speaking, that interpretation hasremained pertinent in both folkloristics and literary scholarship right up until thepresent: the interpretations that see ballads as being poems which describe tragicevents, and romances as narrative poems with happy endings, are a continuation ofthe line of thinking synthesised at the very beginning by Vraz (Cf. Petrovi 1972).For their part, according to Vraz, some differentiate poems only by form, to whichthe poet has no objections due to the fact that both terms are also used for theidentical poem genre in the Romance and German poetry tradition (Cf. Vraz1841: 113-114). Indeed, it would seem that Vrazs romances differ only in formfrom the poems in the first part of the book, while in content they are also largelylove poems of either tragic or dramatic character, so that Vraz anticipated a schol-arly folkloristic approach to that oral literary genre.

3. Vrazs translations of Spanish romances

Interpretation of Vrazs translations of Spanish romances directs one to compari-son of his translating technique with that of Herder, while the poet directly pointsto Herder in his commentary to his Voices(Vraz 1841: 133). Herders translationsare restorational, that is, they want to restore to the poems their popular tone,

which the author considers to be the original form of poetry prior to its havingbeen cloaked in an art appearance. It could be said that Herder avoids the es-trangement (Carbonell) of the original in his translations, endeavouring to retainthe culturological difference (Cf. Beutler 1957; Deli 2004: 1-37). In the cultural

transference of his communicational translations (Carbonell), they never becomecultural transplants (Carbonell) fully adapted to the new linguistic and cultur-ological environment.

In the comments on his romance Suanj[The Captive], Vraz stressed that itwas partially a translation of a Spanish romance (Cf. Vraz 1841: 114). Today wesee that the poet, similarly to some of his contemporaries (the Scotsman Lockhart,for example), recast the romance entitled El prisionero () (Prim. 114114a), alsoknown in modern Hispanic tradition. Herders translation of that romance wasfound in the Annex that Johannes von Mller published after Herders death in

Stimmen der Vlker in Liedern. Admittedly, Vrazs captive was not as stylised as


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the Spanish prisoner. He wore a beard, which is absent in the almost Victorianprisoner in Lockharts English translation (Lockhart 1847: 296-298). In Vrazs

case, from our perspective, it is a matter of a restorational translation of of thatkind that tries to imitate the tone of poems from the oral tradition of the SouthernSlavs: a hero incarcerated in an Ottoman jail learns about the changing seasonsfrom incidental indications during Summer a girls posy of flowers falls into his cellthrough an aperture in the wall, and, during Winter, a snowball thrown by amember of a troop of soldiers falls through (Delorko 1976, No. 146).14 In anycase, his style of translation of the poem intentionally evokes analogy with the po-etry of the Southern Slavs. From todays perspective, Vrazs open emphasis of hissources in the commentary to the collection, again perhaps following the Herdermodel, even more accentuated in the recastings of two romances presented in theGusle i tambura (1845) collection, has the function of demystification of themyths of origin. Together with the other romances in that collection, Vrazsbearded Prisoner is the first to introduce the romance genre into Croatian litera-ture. In that process, as the critics observed in Vrazs commentary to his collec-tion,15 the poet was met with criticism due to the fact that he had introduced for-eign literary genres. It seems that by revealing his models, along with reliance onthe domestic folklore matrix rich in expressions of Turkish origin, Vraz was also

responding to such comments, which were nationalistic in character.In that way, the case of Vrazs recasting of the romance Bovalas el pagano be-

comes even more interesting. Namely, the poet does not mention anywhere in thepublished collection or in his accompanying commentary that the romanceJunakHranilovi [Hranilovi the Hero] is also partly taken from a Spanish romance.Former critics associated this poem with domestic epic tradition failing to recog-nize that this was a translation of a Spanish ballad (Falievac 2003 II: 175). Indeed,

we have to make an effort to recognise that concealed behind Vrazs Asanaga

stands the hero in the title of the romance Bovalas el pagano (-o) (Prim. 126;Grimm 1815: 231-232), known only from XVIth century writings, but not inmodern tradition.16 That protagonist in Vrazs recasting has changed both his

14 I am grateful to Madame Bokovi-Stulli for drawing my attention to this poem.15 Slaven Juri points this out in his entry on Stanko Vraz in the Hrvatska knjievna encik-

lopedija (Croatian Literary Encyclopaedia) [in print].16 We found data on the romance on Susanne Petersens webpage Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project

(Entry No. 1540): http://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/espanol/ballads/balladaction.php< 5.10.2007 > as follows: 1547 Canc. de rom. s.a, f. 186; Canc. de rom. 1550, f. 196;


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name and the context in which the plot of this poem is located, fully adapted tothe map of Dalmatia and the Dalmatian hinterland, characteristic for the topogra-

phy of the oral poem. It goes without saying that the poetry discourse is fullyadapted to imitation of the formulaic nature of Southern Slavic and Croatian oralliterary poems. With an exception: Vraz's poetic Dalmatian topography has realis-tic reference (Velebit, Senj) in a similar way as it is the case with the Spanish ballad(Tablada, Moncayo, Sevilla, Guadalquivir). It is not invented or combined in amanner that has no mimetic reference as it is the case with a good number of Sou-th Slavic poems and folklore poetics in general (Delorko 1979). One could evensay from the interpretor's point of view, that Vraz, by translating Bovalas el paganohispanicizes Croatian recasting by using mimetic poetic topography. Translatio-nal hybridity is probably exercized in twofold directions in a slightly different

way that ocurrs in Herder's translations, but also enriching his own translationsthrough experiencing the culture of other on the far side of the colonization relati-onship between the original and the translation. One could even say that, from theinterpretor's point of view, Vraz slavicizes the Spanish original. This is especiallyevident in the beardedPrisonerromance, where the poet, also, uses an orthodoxtraditional matrix known from South Slavic traditional poetry.

Below we give a synoptic review of a Spanish romance and Vrazs recasting of

it, in which the poet systematically uses assonance, which, in Vrazs opinion, ismore natural to a Slavic language than to German, as he points out in thecommentary to his collection (Vraz 1841: 134).

Silva de 1550 t.I, f. 109; Prim. y Flor de romances No. 126, vol. II, p. 3233. No melodywas recorded.


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Bovalas el pagano (Silva) Romance (Voices)Por las sierras de Moncayo,

vi venir un renegado:Bovalas ha por nombre,Bovalas el pagano.Siete veces fuera moro,y otras tantas mal cristiano;y al cabo de las ocho,enganlo su pecado.que dej la fe de Cristo,la de Mahoma ha tomadoEste fuera el mejor moro

que allende haba pasado:cartas le fueron venidasque Sevilla est en un llano.

Arma naos y galerasgente de a pie y de caballo:por Guadalquivir arribasu pendn llevan alzado.En el campo de Tabladasu real haba asentado.con trescientas de las tiendasde seda, oro y brocado.Nel medio de todas ellas

est la del renegado;encima en el chapitelestaba un rub preciado:tanto relumbra de nochecomo el sol en da claro.17[]

Niz planinu Velebita

Jai mue junak snaan,Na vitezu konju dobru

Jai aga Asanaga.Trikrat primi veru tursku,Tolikokrat i krst astan;Nakon tretje godinicePrevari ga luda glava,Pa ostavi zakon krsta,Prigrlivi red itapa.To najbolje biae Ture,

to jih ima Bosna slavna.Dojde mu list knjige beleOd Udbinje tvrda grada,Da ima grad Senj bieliSred Primorja krna, jadna,Gnezdo kleto, gde se leguSokolovi od junakah,Koji seku turske glave,Plene grade, robe stada,Te udbinski kraj UdbinjaNjim u ake pade paa.

Aga skupi silnu vojskuKonjanikah i peakah. njom prevali planinicu,Pade Senju upred vrata.Trista ator' porazapeNevezenih kitom zlata.

A sred beli tih atorahDignu ator Asanaga;Na njem zlatna jest jabuka,Polumesec na njem straan,Navrh kojeg nameten jeDragi kamen alem sjajan,Koj se blista sred polnoiKano sunce sred poldana.18

17 Grimm 1815: 231232.18 Vraz 1841: 8586.


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[From the Mountain Moncayo,

I saw the convert descend;Bovalas is his name,Bovalias the Pagan.Seven times he switched to Islam,

As many times he was a bad Christian;And the eighth time he changed his faith,He made a sinful error.

And left the faith of Christ,To convert to that of MohammedHe was the very best Moor

Who lived in that land:Letters came to himThat Seville stood on a plain.

Ships and galleys he did raiseAnd infantry and cavalry:Upstream from GuadalquivirBanners waving in the breeze.On the plain of TabladaThey did raise their camp.

With three hundred tentsOf silk, and gold and of brocade.

In the midst of all those tentsThe Renegades tent was pitched;On the tents capitalShines a precious ruby stone:It glows during the night

As does the Sun at midday.]

[Coming down Velebit Mountain

Rides a silent hero hearty,Mounted on a knightly steedRides the aga Asanaga.Three times took the Turkish faith,

As many times the honoured Cross;After three short years had passedHis mind misled him grievously,

Abandoned he the Crosss lawEmbracing then the Qurans rule.The very best of Turks he was,

That glorious Bosnia could produce.A letter came unto his handFrom the fort of Udbina,Telling of the town of SenjPerched misrably in coastal karst,

A cursed nest, where there were hatchedFalcons born of hero sires,

Who cut the heads of Ottomans.And capture forts, and drive off herds,And by the town of Udbina

Een Pasha fell into their grasp.The Aga raised a mighty armyOf mounted men and infantry.

With them he crossed the mountain range,To stand before the gates of Senj.There he pitched three hundred tentsEmbroidered with ropes of gold.

And amid those snow-white tentsAsanaga raised his tent;On it stands an apple golden,

And a fearful crescent moon,At the top in pride of placeA precious stone a diamond shining,Glowing at the midnight hourLike the sun when noon-tide comes.]


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As can be seen from comparison between the Spanish original and the translation,while Bovalas Seven times he switched to Islam,/ As many times he was a bad

Christian, the hero Asanaga Three times took the Turkish faith,/ As many timesthe honoured Cross. While the Spanish hero was the very best Moor, it is toldabout Asanaga: The very best of Turks he was. And if Bovalas crosses Moun-tain Moncayo in the direction of Seville, in the Croatian octosyllabic romance

with assonance, Asanaga rides Coming down Velebit Mountain towards Senj,once the fortress of the Christian Uskoks. Bovalas pitched his tents in Tabladafield, and Asanaga does the same in the neighbourhood of Senj, and the latterstents are equally valuable. Bovalass tent has a valuable ruby on its KAPITEL

which shines equally by night and by day, while Asanagas tent is also richly or-namented: Asanaga raised his tent;/ On it stands an apple golden,/ And a fearfulcrescent moon,/ At the top in pride of place/ A precious stone a diamond shin-ing,/ Glowing at the midnight hour/ Like the sun when noon-tide comes.19. And

while the Spanish romance ends with the brilliance of the ruby on the tent, theCroatian one goes deeper into the model of certain other romances, for examplethe one about Cid Ruy Daz (Prim. 32), in describing Asanaga as the bravest of theSenj heroes, also adding a description of the combat between the Christian andTurkish heroes and the battlefield, with the highly ornamented tent surrounded by

the defeated opponents.We believe that the fact that Vraz omitted references to his sources is not in-

compatible with what we recognise from todays perspective as demystification ofthe myths of origin. Here, Vraz plays a twofold game: once again, he openly relieson the use of the FOLKLORE MATRIXas a sort of literary procedure welcomed inauthorial poetry. This time he does not mention his sources but rather culturallytransplants20 the foreign text into Croatian literature. In the process, he clouds theprovenance of the original, thus emphasising how the foreign influences can be in-

teriorised to such an extent that we forget that they are influences at all. It is nosurprise in that sense that the remaining two romances from the Voices are not re-castings of Spanish romances, but most probably Vrazs own authorial composi-

19 As far as the universal folklore matrix of the incandescent jewel motif in Hispanic and

universal folk and artistic Medieval literature is concerned (cf. Armistead; Silverman1982: 67; fn. 13). More examples are cited by Popovi (1934: 215216), alongside withthe examples of incandescent ruby found in The Legend of Good Women by Chaucer: Neruby noon, that shynede by nighte (ibid.: 215).

20 We would not call the process mystification due to the fact that it has negative connota-tions of nationalistic discoursein proving the original nature of individual traditions.


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tions or, perhaps, reflections of influence from Mickiewicz or some other Roman-tic poet. Thus, all four Vraz romances from Glasi iz dubrave eravinske Savjet

[Advice], Suanj[The Prisoner],Junak Hranilovi[Hranilovi the Hero] andZora iBogdan [Zora and Bogdan] reveal, on the one hand, an entire range of intertextualinterweaving between the romance and oral poetry and, on the other, written poetryin which the importance of origin is lost through that interweaving. This collectiontherefore confirms a playful stance over the text: on the trail of Herder, authorial in-sertion of the poetics of the oral literary discourse into the text of written literature.Could we say that Vrazs own playful treatment of oral poetry authorizes us, that

with this indeed beautiful diamond of Vrazs translation of the Spanish ballad,lost in the sea for centuries and found by us today, we are emerging with great joyto the surface of our interpretation that tries to reconcile philological line of think-ing and more recent Humanist discourse and its mutual successive fertilizations.21

Finally, for the sake of comparison with Vrazs procedure of using folklore ma-trices, we quote some of the concluding words on Herders folklorism in his trans-lations of Spanish romances.22 And while, as we see, Vraz does not shrink from

what we would call the cultural transplant, Herder, although he does not alwaysavoid the use of exoticisms and cultural borrowed words, largely does not resort toculturological transplantation in his translations. While Herder rejects assonance

as inappropriate to the nature of the German language, also inserting enjambe-ment, Vraz on the other hand strictly retains the rhythm of the lines of syllabicversification, while using assonance profusely, regarding it as particularly appropri-ate to Slavic verse. Both introduce parallelistic structures and try to imitate theformulaic nature of Spanish folk poetry. Although Herder never as a rule left versesout of his translation or intervened in the text, since his translation was not a freerecasting as was the case with Percy, where numerous toponyms and localisms

were mentioned in the original, he preferred to omit them,23 unlike Vrazs skilfully

21 We are actually elaborating an extensive study on this Vrazs collection.22 We wrote in more detail about Herders translating techniques in Deli 2004.23 Thus, for example, the Moor who marries the unfaithful Zaida would remain without a

title or so in the translation. Y aquella noche se casa/ Con un moro feo y torpe/ Porquees Alcayde en Sevilla,/ Der Alcazar y la Torre; in Herders translation, his titles are givenin abbreviated form: Und in dieser Nacht vermhlet/ Sie sich einem schlechtenMohren,/ Weil er reich und in Sevilla/ War Alcaide von Alcazar. Cf. Percys translationthat is similar to Herders: She that night, seducd by riches/ Yields herself in nuptial

bonds/ To the sordid old Alcayd,/ Which in proud Seville commands. The quoted verseis part of one of the romances that was included in Percys selection for the anthology,


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recast prosopography. Both of them usually translated the Orientalisms, thanks toidentification with the context from which the Spanish romances emerged, only

when they considered that merely the translation of the words with local colourcould create an effect in the culture of reception, equal to that of the original ety-mological Orientalisms, completely adapted to the standard Spanish linguisticandpoetic discourse. Thus, we could perhaps conclude that the translations by Vrazand Herder were closest to what is usually given the name of so-called communi-cational translation (Carbonell) in translation theory. In that type of translationall similarity between the original and the translated text is subordinated to theobjective and purpose of the translation. When speaking of the objective of theirtranslation, this can be identified as the restoration of the popular poetry tone forthe learned public, which had been accustomed to a different type of poetry upuntil then (Cf. Rlleke 1975). Apart from that, Vraz introduced a new genre intoCroatian literature in the face of a public that also made critical comments againstthis practice.

On the basis of the foregoing, we could perhaps conclude that Herder andVraz, whether actual influences or intertextual interweavings were in question,placed the anthological plot mask on the faces of their subjects, and did so in fullview of their readers since they revealed their sources, also probably so that the rec-

ognition of the Other (the foreign, the domestic) would be as effective as possible.In addition, we could say that Vraz was following the trail of Herder even when

he clouded the origins of his texts: Enlightenment taming of the exotic Other(foreign, village, Self) became a component part of the Other reading subject, while,after Herder, Vraz and many other poets would embrace the romance as the youngliterary genre, which can still seem attractive, even today. At least, it appeals to us,along with our recognition of the similarities between Herders and Vrazs poeticsand translation techniques that rewrite our own interpretative subject.

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