The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh () is a philosophically poetic work by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleà ¾a, comprising thirty poems published between December 1935 and March 1936.
The work spans a period of five centuries, focusing around the commoner prophet Petrica Kerempuh, who is a type of Croatian Till Eulenspiegel. It is written in the northern Croatian Kajkavian dialect.
Krleà ¾a did not typically write in Kajkavian, but decided to put the dialect into focus for the ballads. Literary critics argue that he succeeded in showing that â even if in his time Kajkavian was not used in formal domains of life â it was still possible to create a work of great literal expression in it and that the Kajkavian dialect was not a less valuable literary language.
The poem is generally considered to be a masterpiece of Krleà ¾a's literary opus and of Croatian literature.
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.