priest, and the Sun and Moon act as his godparents—in other words, he is describing his own imminent death in veiled terms, completely allegorized as a Romanian wedding. Textual sources The pastoral ballad has been passed down in a widespread area across the Romanian provinces, with Moldavia at the core. There have been over one thousand versions collected, the best-known and lauded is the reworking by Vasile Alecsandri published in the winter of 1850, perhaps collected straight off of street minstrels. The claim that Alecu Russo was the ballad's discoverer who supplied the material to the poet has been subject to skepticism, since nothing has been found among Russo's papers to substantiate it. A version predating Alecsandri's by several decades came to light in 1991, inscribed in the journals of Gheorghe Șincai from the first half of the 1790s. The Alecsandri version is not entirely different from this, thus establishing that there were indeed original base texts available to him at the time to be reworked, rather than him having to reconstruct the ballad out of whole cloth. It has also been asserted that the ballad originates from the Vrancea district, but the role of the murderous Vrancean shepherd is replaced by a Jewish shepherd in known Vrancean variants of the ballad. The ballad occurs in every Romanian province (thus also in Oltenia and Ukrainian Bessarabia),, and the names (nationalities) of the shepherds and geographical details depends on the localization. The Transylvanian version lacks the lamb's clairvoyance but retains the last will concerning the objects to bury and cosmic wedding. Translations A prose translation in English, "Miora", appeared in E. C. Grenville Murray's Doĭne: Or, the National Songs and Legends of Roumania (1853). This was followed by Lord Henry Stanley's verse translations (1856) into English as well as French. A translation by N. W. Newcombe was also printed in Grigore Nandriș's Colloquial Romanian (1945). The ballad was also rendered under the title "Mioritza: The Canticle of the Sheep, the Enchanted Ewe" by Octavian Buhociu (The Pastoral Paradise: Romanian Folklore, 1966). Translations by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William D. Snodgrass appeared in Miorița (1972), Cinci Balade Populare. Five Folk Ballads (c. 1993) and Selected Translations ("The Ewe Lamb", 1998). A translation by Ernest H. Latham Jr. was published in a Doca's grammar book in 1995; Latham's version (with Kiki Skagen Munshi as co-translator) appeared in his 2020 monograph on the poem. Analysis