Far-off Places: La Guzla and Shevardino
Merimee began his career with two great literary hoaxes: rThedtre de Clara Gazul (1825) and La Guzla, ou choix de poesies illyriques (1827). The latter, filled with folk ballads about bandits and brigands, vampires and the evil eye, was a Balkan take-off on Macpherson's Ossian (which Merimee had translated when he was seventeen).
Ossian had enthralled the European public and turned its attention to far-away times and places, especially the misty Middle Ages, which were just then beginning to replace Greece and Rome as popular subjects for writers.Merimee knew practically no Serbo-Croatian, or, for that matter, any other Slavonic language, but scraped together much of his material from a published collection of modern Greek folksongs and used a few Slavic words and phrases to great effect in his supposed translation, which appeared under a Balkan-sounding pseudonym, Hyacinthe Maglanovich. A guzla, the public was informed, was a one-stringed musical instrument used by Balkan bards. Later, more perceptive critics would add that Guzla was also an anagram of Gazul!14
As it turned out, the public loved these ostensibly “Illyrian” songs, and the verses fooled not only the French, but even the Russian poet Pushkin and the Polish poets Adam Mickiewicz and Aleksander Chodzko, who all translated parts into their respective languages. Pushkin titled his “Songs of the Western Slavs.” The German writer Goethe saw through the sham, but only because Merimee had sent him a signed copy.15
Distant places figured as well in other early works we met above: Tamango (1829), Mateo Falcone (1829), and Lenlevement de la redoute (1829), about Shevardino.