Kossovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs

Kossovo: Heroic Songs of the Serbs is a collection of epic poems from Serbia, translated from the original language in 1920 by Helen Rootham. The book includes a touching Introduction written by the English poet and translator Maurice Baring. Each poem is written in its original Serbian, juxtaposed with the English translation on the opposite page. It will prove to be a useful guide for any student of ancient literature or the Serbian language. HELEN ROOTHAM, born 1875, was an aspiring British poet who translated the works of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in addition to epic Serbian poems. In 1903 she was commissioned as the governess of British poet Edith Sitwell, a position she retained until her death in 1938.

Born in London in 1874, Maurice Baring was a man of letters, a scion of a family long prominent in the financial ventures of the British Empire. The son of the 1st Baron Revelstoke (a director of the Bank of England and a senior partner at Baring Bros.) he was educated at Eton and at Cambridge, and joined the diplomatic service in 1898. In 1904 he became a journalist and reported the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited with having discovered Chekov's work in Moscow and helping to introduce it to the West. Baring is remembered as a versatile, prolific and highly successful writer, who produced articles, plays, biographies, criticism, poetry, translations, stories and novels. He is regarded as a representative of the social culture that flourished in England before World War I, his work highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time.