Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh

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

The work spans a period of five centuries, focusing around the plebeian prophet Petrica Kerempuh, who is a type of Croatian Till Eulenspiegel. It is written in a language based on the Kajkavian dialect. Krleža's expression is heavily interspersed with archaic words of Latin, German, and Hungarian origin—most of them are found in Kajkavian or constructed to match it. Kajkavian has many Latin, German, and Hungarian loanwords, as opposed to standard Croatian, which mostly has loanwords from Turkish. This difference evident in the work comes from the two languages belonging to two distinct cultural circles: the former to the central Europe and the latter to the Balkans.

Krleža usually did not write in Kajkavian, but he decided to put this dialect with over 1000 years of history into the focus of this work. He succeeded in showing that even if in his time Kajkavian 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 a masterpiece of Krleža's literary opus and of Croatian literature.[1]

The Ballads have been translated (mostly only in part) into Slovene, Italian, Macedonian, Hungarian, Czech, French, Russian, and Arabic. A full German translation was published in 2016.[2]