SOURCE: Cooper, Henry R., Jr. “Tasso and Prešeren's Krst pri Savici.” Papers in Slovene Studies (1976): 13-23.

In the following essay, Cooper examines the sources of Prešeren's Krst pri Savici, focusing especially on Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated.

The poetry of the Italian late Renaissance master, Torquato Tasso, particularly his most popular work, the Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Liberated, 1575), influenced poets in Eastern Europe in two different ways. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Eastern European poets—I mean by this specifically Hungarian and Slavic poets—copied directly from the Liberata in order to produce epic poems singing the heroic deeds and heroic loves of national champions. The best examples of such directly derivative works include: the Osman by the Dalmatian poet Ivan Gundulić; the Szigeti veszedelem of the Hungarian Miklós Zrinyi (and its Croatian reworking by his brother Petar Zrinjski); the Wojna domowa, and Pie...