The Ballad
This ballad from which the King of Montenegro—Nicholas Petrovitch—drew inspiration for his drama The Empress of the Balkans is undoubtedly the finest Serbian national poem ever composed and chanted in Montenegro. To render it satisfactorily in its poetic form into another language, compact as it is of intensely national characteristics, metaphors and other figures of speech, religious conceptions, customs and superstitions, would be impossible for even the greatest of our poets.
A French proverb says quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime, ou aime ce que l’on a, and the hope may here be expressed that the philosophic English reader will make the best of the following prose version, such as it is, of a most interesting national poem.