Pan Tadeusz

by Adam Mickiewicz

Overview

Pan Tadeusz is an epic poem by the Polish poet, writer and philosopher Adam Mickiewicz. The book was first published in June 1834 in Paris and is considered by many to be the last great epic poem in European literature. It is a tale of mystery, mistaken identity and patriotism set the days before Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

A new translation of the classic tale of mystery, war and patriotism by Adam Mickiewicz

Pan Tadeusz is an epic poem by the Polish poet, writer and philosopher Adam Mickiewicz. The book was first published in June 1834 in Paris and is considered by many to be the last great epic poem in European literature. It is a tale of mystery, mistaken identity and patriotism set the days before Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

The story takes place over the course of five days in 1811 and two days in 1812, at a time in history, when Poland-Lithuania had already been divided between the armies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria and erased from the political map of Europe, although in 1807, just before the story begins, Napoleon had established a satellite Duchy of Warsaw in the Prussian partition, in existence until the Congress of Vienna held in the aftermath of Napoleonic defeat.

The place is situated within the Russian partition, in the village of Soplicowo; the country estate of the Soplica clan. Pan Tadeusz recounts the story of two feuding noble families, and the love between Tadeusz Soplica (the title character) of one family, and Zosia of the other. Another sub-plot involves a spontaneous revolt of the local inhabitants against the occupying Russian garrison. Since Mickiewicz published his poem as an exile in Paris, he was free of the Russian censors to talk openly about the occupation.

This is the first major translation of this epic poem since the 1993 by one of the great translators of the Polish language Christopher Adam Zakrzewski

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909669512
Publisher:	Jiahu Books
Publication date:	09/29/2013
Pages:	414
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.92(d)
Language:	Polish

About the Author

Author - Adam Mickiewicz is one of the great literary figures of the 19th century. His novel "Pan Tadeusz" is credited to set off the Romantic period of literature. He was a great Polish Patriot who worked for an independent Poland in Europe.

Translator - Mr. Zakrzewski is a literary translator, teacher, scholar, editor. Raised and educated in UK and Ontario, Canada. He pursued his Doctoral work in Russian and Polish literature at the University of British Columbia, including a year of research at the University of Warsaw on a Kosciuszko Foundation Scholarship. Since 2001, he has been teaching at Seat of Wisdom College in Barry’s Bay, Ontario. He is currently translating Bronislaw Wildstein’s novel, Time Continuous (Czas niedokonany). He was awarded the Sarmatian Review Literary Prize in 2010, for his “significant and disinterested contribution to Polish culture.” He and his wife Wendy live in Wilno, Ontario. They have five children and nine grandchildren.

Read an Excerpt

BOOK II.-THE CASTLE ARGUMENT ' Hunting the hare with houndsA guest in the castleThe last of the retainers tells the story of .the last of the HoreszkosA glance into the gardenThe girl among the cucumbersBreakfastPani Telimena's St. Petersburg storyNew outbreak of the quarrel over Bobtail and Falcon The intervention of Robak The Seneschal's speechThe wagerOff for mushrooms. Who among us does not remember the years when, as a young lad, with his gun on his shoulder, he went whistling into the fields, where no rampart, no fence blocked his path; where, when you overstepped a boundary strip, you did not recognise it as belonging to another ! For in Lithuania a hunter is like a ship upon the sea; wherever he will, and by whatever path he will, he roams far and wide ! Like a prophet he gazes on the sky, where in the clouds there are many signs that the hunter's eye can see; or like an enchanter he talks with the earth, which, though deaf to city-dwellers, whispers into his ear with a multitude of voices. There a land rail calls from the meadowit is vain to seek it, for it flees away through the grass like a pike in the Niemen ; there above your head sounds the bell of early spring, the lark, hidden as deeply in the sky; there an eagle rustles with its broad wings through the airy heights, spreading terror among sparrows as a comet among stars; or a hawk, hanging beneath the clear blue vault, flutters its wings like a butterfly impaled on a pin, until, catching sight in the meadow of a bird or a hare, it swoops upon it from on high like a falling star. . When will the Lord God permit us to return from N, our wanderings, and again to dwell upon our ancestral fields, and to serve in thecavalry that makes war on rabbits, or in the infantry that bears arms ag...