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lslernic Studies 36:2, 3 (1 997) 149
But when they were by the aga's house, forth looked her daughters
fair,
And her two sons came before her, and spoke to their mother there:
"Return with us, dear mother, to eat with us again!"
When the wife of Hasan Aga heard, she spake to the groomsman then:
"Brother in God, my groomsman, stop the steeds, of gentleness,
By my house, that I may give fair gifts to my children motherless".
They checked the steeds at the house for her.
She gave her children gifts;
To either son a gilded knife, to her daughters fair long shifts,
To her babe in the cradle a garment in a bit of linen tied.
When Hasan Aga saw it, to his two sons he cried:
"Hither, my children motherless! and from her stand apart!
Pity and mercy hath she none within her stony heart! "
She heard. Her face smote on the ground in the deep of her distress,
And her soul departed as she saw her children motherless.
The ballad Lament of the Noble Woman of the Bajram Beg portrays the
fate of a nobleman's young widow, who, because her son is still an infant, can
find no one to marry other than a common ruffian. He declares that he will
care for the child and takes the young woman and her son to his home town.
En route, the child begins to wail piteously, and all the mother's efforts to
soothe him fail. Because she is too modest to disrobe before this young man to
whom she is not yet married, the young woman has neglected to nurse the child.
She tries to comfort him with her rings, but in vain. Angered by the continuous
crying, the heartless man snatches the baby and throws it from the moving coach
onto the branches of an almond tree.
The ballad Hasan Aga is the counterpart to the Hasan Aginica, and
treats in a psychologically and ethically fascinating way the surprising settlement
of a marital dispute. Behind the verses of this song, which sounds like the
prologue to a play, "there is hidden, despite the gloomy atmosphere of the
introduction, a certain comic element which makes for an even stronger and
more original effect" .25
The ballad Omer i Merima,26 a Bosnian counterpart to the classic love
story Romeo and Juliet, is very beautiful. This poem is the more interesting in
that it follows neither the Eastern pattern (such as that of Majnun and Layla,
Farhad and Shin-n, or Tahir and Zuhra) nor the Western pattern (such as that
of Romeo and Juliet). The Western pattern is characterized by murder and/or
suicide barring the union of lovers; in the Eastern poems death is the tragic
denouncement, but it is not violent death. Death ensues as a result of the
separation and the yearning this loss of love renders unbearable. In the former
case, violent death is the cause of separation; in the latter, lingering death is a
result. The Bosnian tragic love poem occupies a mid-point between these two.
The following two poems offer examples of the subtle ideas of the
Bosnian Muslim lyric songs: