Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh

Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh (Croatian: Balade Petrice Kerempuha) is a philosophically poetical work by Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, composed in form of thirty poems between December 1935 and March 1936.

The spans the period of five centuries, focuses around the plebeian prophet Petrica Kerempuh who is a type of Croatian Till Eulenspiegel. It is written in a language based on the Kaikavian literary language (mentioned in Kajkavian dialect). Krleža's expression is heavily interspersed with archaic words of Latin, German and Hungarian origin - most of them are included in Kaikavian literary language or constructed according to it. Kaikavian literary language has many Latin, German and Hungarian loanwords, as opposed to standard Croatian language which has mostly loanwords from Turkish. This difference evident in Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh comes from the two languages belonging to two distinct cultural circles - the former to the Central European and the latter to the Balkan circle.

Krleža usually did not write in Kaikavian literary language, but decided to put this over 1000 years old language into the focus of this work. He succeeded to show that even if in his time Kaikavian language was not used in formal domains of life, it was still possible to create a work of great literal expression in it.

The poem is generally considered to be a masterpiece of Krleža's literary opus, and of entire Croatian literature.^[1]

The Ballads have been translated - mostly partially - to Slovene, Italian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Czech, French, Russian and Arabic. A full German translation was published in 2016.^[2]

References

Croatian Wikisource has original text related to this article: Balade Petrice Kerempuha