The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire's defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments of poems have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe. With the appearance of the collections of Serbian folk poems by Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, the brilliance of the poetry in the Kosovo and related cycles of ballads was affirmed by poets and critics as deeply influential as Goethe, Jacob Grimm, Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin. Although translations into English have been attempted before, few of them, as Charles Simic notes in his preface, have been persuasive.

Ivan V. Lalic, the contemporary Yugoslav poet, has declared that Matthias and Vuckovic have "found the right approach, the right answer to the challenge" of translating the entire cycle of Kosovo poems. He has called the results of the collaboration "a series of fine, inspired, sometimes brilliant, truly poetical solutions" which will be "a great thing as far as the modern reception of Serbian traditional culture is concerned." Charles Simic compares the movement of the verse in these translations to the "variable foot" effect of William Carios Williams' later poetry, and argues that Matthias "grasps the poetic strategies of the anonymous Serbian poet as well as Pound did those of Chinese poetry."

John Matthias is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He has published five volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Northern Summer: New and Selected Poems, and he has co-translated contemporary Yugoslav poetry with Vladeta Vuckovic and contemporary Swedish poetry with Goran Printz-Pahlson. Vladeta Vuckovic is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. Alongside many professional papers on mathematical topics, he has published poetry in Serbo-Croatian and fiction in English.