Sveto pismo (Daničić-Karadžić)

The Sveto pismo of Daničić and Karadžić is at once a Bible and the birth certificate of a language. The New Testament was translated by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and published in Vienna in 1847; the Old Testament came from Đuro Daničić, printed in Belgrade in 1865. Together the two halves formed the first complete Bible in vernacular Serbian — the language of the market and the home, not of the altar.

Karadžić was no mere translator; he was the reformer who remade written Serbian under one plain motto: write as you speak. His New Testament applied that conviction to Scripture, trading the distant, archaic Church Slavonic for the language people actually used. Daničić, his student and a philologist of the first rank, did the same for the Old Testament. The result was a clear, musical prose that became, in itself, the foundation of modern literary Serbian.

It was not received without friction. For much of the Serbian Orthodox Church, abandoning Church Slavonic bordered on profanation — the sacred tongue was not meant to come down to everyday speech. Yet it was precisely that descent that gave the translation its power: whole generations could now read Scripture with no linguistic middleman. In time, the work of Vuk and Daničić came to hold a place in Serbian culture close to that of the King James in English or Luther's Bible among Germans.

Owing to its age, the Sveto pismo of Daničić-Karadžić is in the public domain and may be read, copied, and shared freely. More than a century and a half on, it remains a double monument: to Scripture in Serbian, and to the Serbian language as we know it today.