Public-Domain Folk Tale Collected by Vuk Karadžić

„Крепао котао“ is a compact comic folk tale built around a deliberately absurd bargain: a moneylender accepts that his cauldron has produced offspring, then objects when the same fiction costs him the cauldron itself. The language moves rapidly through aorists, a few perfect forms, dialogue, clitics, and older Ijekavian vocabulary. Reading it well therefore means recovering the narrator's logic, not replacing every word mechanically with an English equivalent.

Source witness and editorial layers

The base witness is the second expanded edition of Српске народне приповијетке, published in Vienna in 1870 by Ana, widow of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The cited tale appears on pp. 289–290 in the original pagination; the public-domain Wikisource transcription supplies that bibliographic reference, while the electronic edition hosted in the Anthology of Serbian Literature presents the same text on its p. 224. The volume credits Vuk with collecting the material; this posthumous edition does not turn him into the tale's individually identifiable author.

Three layers are kept separate here:

1. Source-text layer: lexical and grammatical forms such as ракијнски, мјере, послије, фала, не ћу, штогођ and потјера are retained. Where the two electronic transcriptions differ because of evident transcription noise, the reading supported by the Anthology edition is used.
2. Teaching transcription: line breaks, spacing, capitalization, commas around speech tags, and quotation marks are regularized for readability. This is not a diplomatic facsimile.
3. Modern reading aid: explicitly labeled Ekavian paraphrases use current spelling and syntax. They are never passed off as Vuk's wording.

The complete short tale: conservative reading transcription

Измисли један прости сељанин како би преварио неког каматника трговца у вароши, који му је доста кривице урадио, и пође један дан у трговца молећи га: „Господару, молим те, узајми ми котао ракијнски да нешто ракије испечем, а до данашњега дана донијећу ти га и добити нањ талијер.“

Слакоми се трговац и узајми му котао, а сељанин седми дан пође к трговцу и однесе један преко мјере мали котлић ракијнски говорећи: „Знаш шта је, господару?“ „Шта?“ запита трговац. „Богме се окотио твој котао“, одговори сељанин, „и ево сам ти ждријебе од њега донио, јер је у мене ждријебан и дошао, а ја твојега не ћу.“ „Браво! Браво!“, одговори трговац. „По томе се види да си човјек поштен, фала ти!“

„Него молим те, господару“, придода сељанин, „нека још који дан у мене постоји котао, јер га онако болесна не могу справити.“ „Добро дакле“, одговори му трговац.

Послије десетак дана дотрчи уплашен сељанин к трговцу, па му рече: „Господару, не знаш несреће?“ „Које?“, запита трговац. „Крепао котао.“ „Како крепао, ничији сине!“, продере се трговац. „Како може котао крепати?“ „Ето како“, прихвати сељанин. „Штогођ се коти, ваља и да крепа.“

И на овај начин, кад трговац потјера сељанина на суд, сељанин и у суду добије разлог и узме велики котао за мали.

The punctuation above clarifies who is speaking, but it does not modernize the tale's morphology. The wording is public domain; the editorial display is pedagogical.

Idiomatic translation

Here is a complete continuous translation of the teaching transcription:

A simple peasant devised a way to trick a moneylending merchant in town who had done him a great wrong. One day he went to the merchant and begged him: “Sir, please lend me your brandy cauldron so that I can distill some brandy. I will bring it back by the agreed day, with a thaler’s profit on it.”

Tempted by the gain, the merchant lent him the cauldron. On the seventh day the peasant went to the merchant and brought him an unusually small brandy cauldron, saying: “Do you know what happened, sir?” “What?” asked the merchant. “By heaven, your cauldron gave birth,” replied the peasant, “and here I have brought you its foal. It came to me pregnant, and I do not want to keep what is yours.” “Bravo! Bravo!” replied the merchant. “This shows that you are an honest man. Thank you!”

“But please, sir,” the peasant added, “let the cauldron stay with me a few more days, because I cannot send it back while it is so ill.” “Very well, then,” the merchant replied.

About ten days later the frightened peasant came running to the merchant and said: “Sir, you do not know what a disaster has happened!” “What disaster?” asked the merchant. “The cauldron died.” “How could it have died, you wretch?” the merchant shouted. “How can a cauldron die?” “Like this,” the peasant answered. “Whatever gives birth must also die.”

And so, when the merchant took the peasant to court, the peasant won his case there too and kept the large cauldron in exchange for the small one.

The translation makes the social relationship and the joke explicit. Добити нањ талијер is an older compressed promise of a thaler's return or profit on the loan, not the modern infinitive to receive it. Добије разлог means that the peasant is judged to have the stronger case, not that he physically receives a reason.

Line-by-line grammatical map

The opening један прости сељанин ... неки каматник трговац is a compact folk-narrative introduction: indefinite participants enter after the first verb and are thereafter tracked by role nouns and pronouns. It does the work of a longer modern setup without the fairy-tale formula био једном.

Historical present, aorist, and perfect backstory

The foreground is not one tidy tense paradigm. Рече is an unambiguous aorist of рећи, and it packages the peasant's announcement as one bounded speech event. Many other third-person perfective forms—измисли, пође, узајми, однесе, запита, дотрчи, прихвати—have a surface form shared by the present and aorist. The closing добије, узме has present morphology and is a clear historical present. Past-time reference alone therefore does not license calling every foreground form an aorist.

What unites these forms is their discourse role: they advance the scheme one bounded step at a time. The mixture of historical present and aorist is characteristic of vivid folk narration, but a learner should identify morphology as well as story time.

The perfect serves a different job. Је ... урадио reaches behind the opening event to explain motive; је ... дошао belongs inside the peasant's invented backstory. The distinction is discourse-based: the aorist pushes the joke forward, while the perfect supplies a prior cause or reported state.

Contemporary speakers can retell the whole tale naturally with the perfect. That does not make the source aorists errors; it changes narrative register. See the aorist and narrative foregrounding for the larger system.

Clitics, dialogue, and recovered ellipsis

Clitics remain near the second position of their clause: који му је, узајми му, ево сам ти ... донио, по томе се види, одговори му. Translating each in source order produces awkward English because English places pronouns according to verb argument structure, not a second-position cluster.

Dialogue also omits recoverable material. Које? means "Which misfortune?"; Како крепао? means "How could it have died?" The masculine l-participle крепао recovers котао. English normally restores an auxiliary and subject.

The vocative господару marks deferential address in the tale's social world. It is not a neutral modern substitute for sir in every situation. Ничији сине is an angry insult (literary/older), while богме is an emphatic particle still recognizable today but strongly colored by speaker and region.

Older vocabulary and the logic of the joke

Calling the little cauldron ждријебе, a foal, makes the false biology vivid. The merchant accepts this metaphor because it benefits him. The peasant then preserves the same semantic frame for крепати. The humor depends on pragmatic inconsistency: the merchant wants literal logic only after the profitable fiction turns costly.

Common Mistakes

Silently modernizing a quotation

Translating a clitic chain in source order

Treating крепати as neutral for people

Missing the merchant's inconsistency

Reuse Exercises

1. Retell the complete plot in contemporary Ekavian Serbian using the perfect. Preserve every participant and motive, but replace ракијнски, нањ, слакоми се, фала and добије разлог with current equivalents. Label the result a paraphrase.
2. Underline every dative and accusative clitic in the source. For each one, name its referent and explain why its English equivalent moves to a different position.
3. Rewrite the final exchange as a modern courtroom dialogue. The peasant must make the same consistency argument without claiming that metal objects literally reproduce.

Key Takeaways

• The volume credits Vuk with collecting the folk tale; he is not presented as its identifiable individual author.
• The source-text, teaching-transcription, and modern-paraphrase layers must remain labeled and distinct.
• Historical presents and the aorist рече carry the foregrounded scheme, while perfect forms supply prior motive and invented backstory.
• Second-position clitics keep participants accessible even when English must reorder or restore them.
• The punch line works because the merchant accepts one impossible consequence but rejects another consequence of the same premise.

The tale's grammar and humor are inseparable. Historical presents and aorist рече accelerate the scheme, perfects supply motive and invented backstory, clitics keep participants recoverable, and ellipsis sharpens the exchange. Modernize those features only with an explicit label; otherwise the source's historical voice disappears precisely where its argument becomes effective.