P.

Servian songs begin also frequently with a series of questions, the answers to which form mostly a very happy introduction to the tale.  For instance: 

  What’s so white upon yon verdant forest? 
  Is it snow, or is it swans assembled? 
  Were it snow, it surely had been melted;
  Were it swans, long since they had departed. 
  Lo! it is not swans, it is not snow, there,
  ’T is the tents of Aga, Hassan Aga, etc.[6]

In Russian songs, on the other hand, a form of expression frequently occurs, which we venture to call a negative antithesis.  It is less clear than the Servian, but just as peculiar.  A preceding question seems to be frequently supposed; as we have also seen in the piece adduced above, “It is not a swallow,” the poet says, “that clings to her nest; it is a mother who clings to her son.”  In other songs we hear;

  Not a falcon floateth through the air,
  Strays a youth along the river’s brim, etc.

or,

  Not a cuckoo in the forest cool doth sing,
  Not in the gardens sings a nightingale;
  In the prison dark a brave youth sighs,
  He sighs and pours out many parting tears.

The frequency of standing epithets, characteristic more or less of all popular poetry, is particularly observable among the Slavic nations.  The translator will be troubled to find corresponding terms; but whatever he may select, it is essential always to employ the same; for instance, he must not translate the far-extended idea of bjeloi, white, alternately by white, bright, snowy, fair.  In Slavic, not only things really white are called so, but every thing laudable and beautiful is called white; as, the white God, i.e. the good God; the white Tzar, i.e., the monarch of white, or great and powerful, Russia.  In most cases the poet himself no longer thinks of the signification and original meaning of the word.  Yards, walls, bodies, breasts, hands, etc. are invariably white; even the breast and the hand of the tawny Moor.  The sea is seldom mentioned without the epithet blue; Russian heroes have black hair, but the head of the Servian hero is called Rusja glava, fair-haired, with a reddish shade.  Russian youths, together with their steeds, are invariably dobroe, that is, good or brave; the heart is in the poetry of the same nation retivoe, cheerful, rash, light.  The sun is in Servian yarko, bright; in Russian krasnoi, which signifies fair and red.  Doves are in both languages gray.  How much the poets are accustomed to these epithets, and how heedlessly they use them, appears from a Servian tale, called “Haykuna’s Wedding,” a charming poem, and even much more elaborated than is common, where the breasts of a beautiful girl are compared to two gray doves.  To remind our readers of the father of popular poetry, Homer, and of the like use by him of stereotype epithets, is unnecessary.