In Podgorica, Montenegro, I saw this poem for the forest, but I cannot find any English translation online.
Can any of my Serbian/Montenegrin-speaking readers help? Thank you very much!
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The Happy Hermit 
I guess it is something with “Silence” and “Woods”. By the way, the few lovely looking trees in the forground is staghorn sumac, and it is a real pest. it can overgrow everything, and once you get it in your garden by chance, the value of your property and that of the neighboring estates drops dramatically.
Are you trying to blame Montenegro’s relative poverty on an innocent plant? :-)
Who knows, maybe this tree was even behind the sub-prime Real Estate crisis 2009, that made Lehman Brothers going bust.
A Forest’s Prayer?
http://www.ues.rs.ba/en/faculty-of-agriculture/news/international-day-of-forests-2015
Free translation:
prayer of the forest
Man, when you walk by my side
listen to me and hear my prayer;
Don’t crush me unnecessarily, do not burn me
nor neglect me, don’t cut me for no reason
do not hurt me recklessly
I heat your home and heart
on cold winter nights, I have wood
for your crib, boards of your table and beds
can be a place of eternal rest.
Man, do not destroy me!
Preserve me for your children!
ohw. I see the whole poem in the link above now. Should’ve clicked that first, I guess. Well, disregard thisn one then :-)
Thank you very much!!
What a blessing to have multilingual readers from all around the world.
Actually, I don’t speak a word of the language but an on-line translator and some handy tools did the trick :-P (however, the thing said this was Croatian, though. Not Serbian)
It’s basically the same language. Until the breakup of Yugoslavia it was called Serbo-Croatian, but then every country wanted to have their own language and changed a letter here, an accent there.
ah, got it. Well, the translator recognized it. And compared to the real translation in the link above, I think it didn’t do it that bad after all (with a few additional google tricks, admitted). I just thought it a challenge to see if I could somehow translate the (for me) totally incomprehensible language to a more or less understandable and sensible text :-)