Introduction

The Slavonic languages and their literatures are so little studied in our own country, that it is to be feared that many English men and women have not even heard the name of Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz. When, a few years ago, a tablet was affixed to the house at Rome in which the poet had for a short time lodged, there were many oracular utterances in the newspapers to make clear to wondering foreigners what sort of person that name implied. And yet the writings of Mickiewicz are well worth our attention. He is preeminently the national poet of Poland; in him is to be found the voice of its sufferings and struggles⁠—the echo of its history and long-cherished traditions. No writer has more faithfully reproduced the old Polish life and manners and the spirit of its national songs. He has himself beautifully said that in the popular lay lies hidden the weapon of the nation’s hero, and the woven thread of the nation’s thoughts⁠—

“With the wings and voice of the archangel
Sometimes also thou holdest the sword of the archangel;”1⁠—

and all this will assuredly be found in his own poetry, with its quaint tales of old Polish life and Lithuanian chivalry, its fantastic legends of enchanted lakes and oaks of immemorial sanctity.

It is probable that only the circumstance of his poems being written in a difficult language, which it is not the fashion to study in England, has kept them so absolutely unknown to our countrymen. Such is far from being the case in Germany and France. But in the words of doom, vae victis, may also be read the degradation of the language of the conquered. Polish, however, is not yet a dead language nor likely to be; it is still spoken by nearly ten millions of people, and boasts of many living writers of merit.

Let us hope then that our countrymen will welcome this work by Miss Maude A. Biggs, a lady already so favourably known by her version of “Konrad Wallenrod.” She puts before us a translation of a celebrated poem by Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, a graphic picture of old Polish life in Lithuania before the invasion of Russia by Napoleon in 1812. During the independence of Poland this country had formed a very important portion of the republic; it is now divided into Russian governments.

Perhaps the novelty of the manners described in this poem, and the graphic pictures of earlier forms of society, may recommend it to the English reader. Miss Biggs has performed her task exceedingly well, although Polish is so difficult a language and the poem she has selected is national to the very core. For the rhyming lines of the original she has substituted blank verse, a metre with which Englishmen are familiar in long poems, and which allows a translator to be more literal by emancipating him from what have been called the tags of rhyme. She is always faithful to her author, and cleverly reproduces the spirit of his poem, although something must necessarily be lost in every translation. The manly sounds of the English language are fitter than those of many others for reproducing the echoes of the vigorous Polish tongue. It is impossible not to recall to one’s mind the fine words of Casimir Brodzinski, himself a poet of no mean order. “Let,” says he, “the Pole smile with manly pride when the inhabitant of the banks of the Tiber or Seine calls his language rude; let him hear with keen satisfaction and the dignity of a judge the stranger who painfully struggles with the Polish pronunciation, like a sybarite trying to lift an old Roman coat of armour, or when he strives to articulate the language of men with the weak accent of a child. So long as courage is not wanting to our nation, and our morals have not become degraded, let us not disavow this manly roughness of our language. It has its harmony and its melody, but it is the murmur of an oak of three hundred years, and not the plaintive and feeble cry of a reed, swayed by every wind.”

The life of Mickiewicz, who died thirty years ago, was a very sad one. He was born in 1798, and at an early age became an exile, never seeing his native country after 1829. How great were his longings to revisit it, we find by the commencement of Pan Tadeusz, which breathes all the despair of an exile. He settled in Paris and became a professor of the Slavonic languages and literatures at the College de France. This office, however, he was compelled to resign on account of his identifying himself with the strange views of Towianski. His wife afterwards became He insane, and we have a pathetic portrait of the poet towards the close of his life in the Memoirs of Herzen, published originally in the Russian magazine Polar Star (Poliarnaia Zviezda). He appeared to the Russian politician as a man bowed down with troubles, prematurely grey, and lost in the labyrinths of religious mysticism. In 1855 he was sent to Constantinople to assist in forming a Polish legion to serve against the Russians in the Crimean War, and died there.

Mickiewicz is altogether a strange and interesting figure, and deserves to be known much more widely than in the comparatively narrow circle of his compatriots. He has shown excellence in many fields of literature, but especially in his ballads and narrative poems. The exquisite grace and finish of his sonnets, especially those inspired by the poet’s visit to the Crimea, will be acknowledged by all acquainted with his writings; they are the finest in any Slavonic language, and may be compared with some of the best Italian and English compositions of the same kind.

With the good wishes of a few hearty admirers of the poet this version of one of his most striking productions is venturesomely sent forth to the great English-speaking public.