About the Work

by Denis Ferhatović

I was in the stacks of my first college library, two decades ago, leafing through an anthology of texts written in alhamiado, which in the Balkans means Arabic script adapted for the central South Slavic vernacular, when I chanced upon this delightful poem. (In the Iberian context, aljamiado refers to Romance linguistic varieties written in Arabic letters.) “Saliha and Ramo” stood apart from the surroundings which, with a few other exceptions, mostly contained stultifying religious and historical writing, such as sermons in verse against tobacco or for wifely obedience, and pathetic petitions to the authorities for support from the edges of the Empire. “Ramo and Saliha” features the voice of a defiant woman in a rural setting, a shepherdess, who tells her ex-lover that she owes him nothing.

The poem, composed in a familiar South Slavic folk vein, is found with Mullah Mustafa Başeski’s lively Chronicle (Mecmua [lit., Compilation]) covering the years of 1746-7 to 1804-5 (AH 1159-1219). We know nothing about the author of “Ramo and Saliha.” Mehmed Mujezinović, Başeski’s translator into Bosnian, argues that the chronicler merely copied it. In any case, the poet probably did not belong to the rank of the characters who must have been illiterate. This might be a fantasy of rough, fabric-shredding shephard sex by a member of an urban, educated class like Başeski. At the same time, the picture of Saliha in the poem indicates what was plausible in eighteenth-century Ottoman Bosnia. She is an outspoken woman of humble background who enjoys fancy commodities like sweetmeats, clothes, and cosmetics. Moreover, knowing their precise monetary value, she can add up Ramo’s relationship-related expenses switching between her vernacular and Turkish. I left the Turkish untranslated to keep much of the bilingual texture of the poem. Here is the code: 300 + 40 x 2 = 380; + 80 = 460;  + 60 = 520;  + 60 = 580;  + 20 = 600.

I should add some words of explanation about a piece of realia and Saliha’s reference to her genitals. Rusma refers to a depilatory paste consisting of orpiment and slaked lime. Orpiment, from auripigment, is a sulfide of arsenic, a toxic, bright yellow, orange, or red substance. It was used in depilatories in the United States into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rusma and hrmza (both meaning a type of depilatory paste) are cognates, in English and Bosnian from Ottoman Turkish and in there perhaps from Greek (the same word that becomes chrism). Saliha’s hajkavica was harder to render. I did not want to make the character sound like Chaucer’s Alisoun of Bath who uses multiple vulvar expressions (queynte, bele chose, quoniam), although I do see a certain resemblance between them. The option I settled on and still a striking word in American English, cunt, has a long history. It has been reclaimed by feminists. It appears as con in the French fabliaux, a genre – like Saliha – very aware of material value of objects, food, and sex.

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Denis Ferhatović (b. 1980) is a Bosnian-American scholar and writer, working and playing with English, French, Turkish, Indonesian, South Slavic microlanguages, and medieval Germanic and Romance languages. His essays, poems, translations, and co-translations have been published in Rumba under Fire, Index on Censorship, The Riddle Ages, and Iberian Connections. His scholarly work appears in various journals and essay collections. His monograph Borrowed Objects and the Art of Poetry: Spolia in Old English Verse came out in 2019.

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