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importance, or they may possibly have committed the piece to writing as it was actually sung by the country-folk, but this is conjecture.
Three years later Fortis published his Viaggio in Dalmazia, a work of much greater importance. A complete section of the book is devoted to the manners and customs of the "Morlacks[1]" (De' Costumi de' Morlacchi), and to a chapter on their poetry and music there is appended as an example of the former, the poem afterwards made famous by Goethe under the title of "Klaggesang von der edlen Frauen des Asan Aga."
This ballad was printed by Fortis in the original Serbian together with a parallel translation in Italian, and is presented with the apologetic air common to the early collectors[2]. "I have translated several heroic songs of the Morlacchi," he writes, "and several of them appear to me to be both well-conducted and interesting, but I very readily allow that they cannot be put in comparison with the poems of the celebrated Scotch bard which we have lately had the pleasure of seeing translated into our own language with true poetical spirit by the Abbé Cesarotti[3]."
The source from which the "Klaggesang" was derived remained for long a mystery. It is not in Kačić and only in 1883 when Miklošić published the text of a manuscript sent to him by friends in Ragusa, was the problem at last solved[4]. It is now clear that Fortis must have had this MS. or a close variant of it before him when he made his own copy, and as luck would have it, this particular poem is a perfect specimen of its kind.
In 1775 a translation by Werthes of the Morlacchian section was published at Berne as Die Sitten der Morlacken, and next
- ↑ A name of disputed origin. For Fortis' opinion on the subject, see Travels into Dalmatia, pp. 46-47. London, 1778.
- ↑ Cf. Percy: "In a polished age like the present, I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them."
- ↑ Travels into Dalmatia (English trans. of the Viaggio). London, 1778
- ↑ Über Goethes Klaggesang von der edlen Frauen des Asan Aga. Vienna, 1883. See Ćurčin, p. 43.
