Pan Tadeusz
Page 1
English language copyright © Bill Johnston, 2018
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mickiewicz, Adam, 1798-1855, author. | Johnston, Bill, 1960–translator.
Title: Pan Tadeusz : the last foray in Lithuania /
Adam Mickiewicz; translated by Bill Johnston.
Other titles: Pan Tadeusz. English | Last foray in Lithuania.
Description: New York : Archipelago, 2018.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019420 (print) | LCCN 2018025352 (ebook)
ISBN 9781939810014 (ebook) | ISBN 9781939810007 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Mickiewicz, Adam, 1798-1855–Translations into English.
Epic poetry, Polish. | Poland–Poetry. | BISAC: POETRY
Russian & Former Soviet Union. | POETRY / Epic.
Classification: LCC PG7158.M5 (ebook) | LCC PG7158.M5 P312 2018 (print)
DDC 891.8/516–dc23| LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019420
Archipelago Books
232 3rd Street #A111
Brooklyn, NY 11215
www.archipelagobooks.org
Distributed by Penguin Random House
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Cover art: Stanisław Witkiewicz, “Springtime Mist,” 1893
This work was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Lannan Foundation, The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ebook ISBN 9781939810014
v5.3.2
a
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
A Guide to Polish Pronunciation
List of Characters
PAN TADEUSZ
Book I: The Estate
Book II: The Castle
Book III: Flirtations
Book IV: Diplomacy and the Hunt
Book V: The Quarrel
Book VI: The Settlement
Book VII: The Council
Book VIII: The Foray
Book IX: The Battle
Book X: Emigration. Jacek
Book XI: 1812
Book XII: Let Us Love One Another
Epilogue
Mickiewicz’s Explanations
Translator’s Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Pan Tadeusz, widely regarded as the national epic of Poland, was first published in 1834 in Paris by a poet born a Russian citizen in present-day Belarus who sings of his longing for Lithuania. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) was a thirty-five-year-old exile who had left his native region nine years before, never to return. In this introduction I will, among other things, try to prise apart the complex interlocking strands of national and regional identity that weave through this book and the life of its author.
Pan Tadeusz was written at a very particular moment in both historical and social terms. Historically, Poland was reeling from a long series of dramatic and tragic events that had effectively erased the country from the map. In terms of Polish society, in turn, a relatively stable, clearly defined way of life that had existed largely unchanged for centuries had come to an abrupt end in the space of a single generation. These two radical transformations, transmuted by Mickiewicz’s personal tribulations and longings, comprise the foundation of his poem.
Since the sixteenth century Poland had been a significant European power. In 1569 it joined with Lithuania to become the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known in Polish as the “Republic of the Two Nations,” a relationship resembling that between England and Scotland after the Act of Union of 1605. And, much as in that example, through the following two centuries the populations intermingled, the landowning classes of Lithuania becoming increasingly polonized. Thus, when Mickiewicz apostrophizes Lithuania in his opening line, he is thinking of a Lithuania that is to a significant extent Polish in language, culture, and orientation.
Through the seventeenth century Polish power and influence in Europe continued to increase. In 1683, King John III Sobieski led a combined army from Poland-Lithuania, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Habsburg Monarchy, in a campaign to push back the Ottoman army, which had advanced west and was besieging Vienna. Sobieski relieved the siege, defeated the Turks, and turned back their army. For this he was fêted as the “savior of Christendom.” (Sobieski’s triumph is referred to in Pan Tadeusz more than once.)
Yet even at this point the Polish state was weakening from both internal and external causes. Internally, a lack of heirs in the royal family had led in 1573 to the introduction of an elected monarchy. One point of Polish pride even today is the fact that at the time, Poland was the most democratic country in Europe. Every adult male member of the gentry – which constituted about 10 percent of the population – could vote in the Polish parliament, the Sejm. (Indeed, members of the gentry could even be candidates for the throne, as Father Robak mentions in Book X.) Yet there was also a controversial law known as liberum veto, by which any legislation had to be agreed upon unanimously – a veto by a single deputy could nullify it. In theory this ensured a healthy reliance on consensus. In practice, it often paralyzed the government. While these developments challenged the country from within, throughout the seventeenth century there were also significant threats from the outside, including wars with Russia and Sweden, and a series of Cossack uprisings.
By the mid-eighteenth century the country had grown weak, and eventually its neighbors decided to carve it up. In the course of successive partitions, in 1772 and 1793 Russia, Prussia, and Austria each took increasingly large chunks of Poland, then in the final partition of 1795 they divided up what was left of the country. Politically speaking, Poland was no more. In the meantime, in 1791 Poland had produced the Third of May Constitution, only the second such document in the world (after the American Constitution of 1787), whose symbolic power was great even though it was in force for only a couple of years.
Poles fought back repeatedly against their occupiers. The Russians were a particular target. Even before the first partition, the Bar Confederation (1768–1772), mentioned frequently in Pan Tadeusz, fought against Russian influence. In 1794 Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), the Polish freedom fighter after whom the title character of the poem is named, led an army of volunteers that inflicted several defeats on the Russians, though it was ultimately overcome. It was during the 1794 uprising, long before the events of the poem itself, that the Pantler’s death occurred, since the latter had sided with Kościuszko, and thus was attacked by the Russians in the night (see the Steward’s story in Book II). At the same time, not all Poles opposed the Russians – the Targowica Confederation was an association of Polish and Lithuanian magnates who were backed by Russia and were later regarded as traitors to the Polish cause.
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, so longed for by the inhabitants of Soplicowo in Pan Tadeusz, was a great hope for many Poles, who thought that the French emperor would crush the power of the tsar and restore Poland’s liberty. Starting in 1797, General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski began to raise Polish legions in Italy (which was then under French rule); these legions fought throughout the later Napoleonic campaigns,
and joined the massive army that marched into Russia in 1812. In 1807, Napoleon created the semi-independent Duchy of Warsaw, which seemed to offer a starting point for a new Polish state. The Niemen River, which flowed not far from the Judge’s estate, formed the border between the Duchy and the Russian Empire.
Then in 1830, immediately before Pan Tadeusz was written, another armed insurrection, this time based in Warsaw, was again put down by the Russians – this is the “blood . . spilled in Poland lately” that is referred to in the Epilogue.
It was in the wake of this tumultuous series of events that Pan Tadeusz came to be written. Mickiewicz began the poem soon after moving to Paris in 1832; it was completed and published there two years later.
The author had been born in the country near Nowogródek, then thought of as a Polish town, though at that time it was already part of the Russian Empire. Today it is Navahrudak in Belarus. He came into the world in 1798 as a sort of posthumous child of the partitions – “To bondage born, in chains since infancy,” as he puts it in Book XI. He was brought up on a country estate somewhat like the Soplicowo of the book. He went to university in Vilna (Polish, Wilno), today’s Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, where shortly after graduating he got into trouble with the authorities over his involvement in a student society called the Philomaths. He was forced to take up residence in Russia, where he spent five years. After that he moved to western Europe, residing for longer or shorter periods of time in Paris, Rome, Dresden, Lausanne, and elsewhere. He never returned to his home region. Pan Tadeusz was written many years after he had last visited the places he describes.
Mickiewicz absolutely thought of himself as a Pole; he wrote in Polish and concerned himself with Polish literature and Polish politics, including Polish independence. Yet he wrote from a position far from the center. The fact that the author felt it necessary to include notes in Pan Tadeusz suggests among other things that its distant regional setting was exotic for many Polish readers of his time. Furthermore, it was precisely in this relatively remote and peaceful region that the passing ways of life referred to above had been maintained the longest. The gentry, into which Mickiewicz was born, and the aristocracy were Polish-speaking, but the local peasant classes would have spoken Belarussian or Lithuanian, and Mickiewicz’s sense of belonging was precisely to this multilingual and multicultural area that might in many ways have been considered a backwater in terms of mainstream Polish culture.
By the 1830s, however, Mickiewicz had come to be regarded as the great hope of Polish letters. Before 1834 he had published lyric poetry, numerous long narrative poems including Grażyna and Konrad Wallenrod, and an epic verse drama entitled Dziady or Forefather’s Eve, whose hero Gustaw (he later changes his name, becoming Konrad) attempts to assassinate the tsar. These previous works had been of stunning quality, but rather earnest and intense. The appearance of Pan Tadeusz came as a great shock to many – its humor, its lyrical simplicity, and its novelistic character were utterly unlike anything the author had ever written before. It also proved to be his poetic swan song – after Pan Tadeusz he never published any further collection of poetry in his own lifetime. He dedicated much of the rest of his life to political writing and activism in the cause of Polish independence; he died in 1855 in Istanbul, where he was trying to organize a Polish force to join the Crimean War against the Russians.
What kind of work is Pan Tadeusz? In terms of genre, it’s a book that is many things at once. As mentioned above, in Poland it is commonly referred to as the “national epic,” and it certainly has many of the marks of epic poetry: its grand scale and ambitious language, its non-present-day setting, and its emphasis on national identity, for example. Many epics have nation-building goals. In some cases, like Virgil’s Aeneid, the aim was to provide a dignified origin story. Mickiewicz’s purpose was somewhat similar: it was to remind a broken nation of its greatness, its glory, and its power for future change. In this sense Pan Tadeusz can be read as an appeal for unity in resistance, a Tyrtaean call to arms, and even more: an attempt to heal decades of national trauma. Furthermore, unspoken in the text is the author’s own sense of guilt at not having taken part in the 1830 uprising. One can read the book in part as atonement for his inaction at that time.
Yet if there are prominent epic elements in the structure and language of the poem, at the same time Mickiewicz consciously flouts many of the conventions for epic poetry. An epic poem is traditionally supposed to take place in a distant, often semi-mythic past, and describe characters and deeds of heroic magnitude – people who are stronger, purer, more spectacular than us or our contemporaries. Instead of this, Mickiewicz sets his epic a mere twenty or so years before its writing and publication, and gives us a world that, when all is said and done, is of small, modest proportions. Instead of descriptions of heroic deeds we read of a feud between quarrelsome neighbors; in place of descriptions of gods and heroes we’re given recipes for coffee or stew. Several direct quotations and references to epic poems, primarily from Homer and Virgil, are scattered throughout Pan Tadeusz. Yet in most cases their use is clearly ironic. In Book XI, ll. 99 – 100, for instance, the Warden cannot sleep because he has to prepare the dinner for the next day:
All slept: the Judge, the officers and the men.
Sweet sleep was kept from the Warden’s eyes alone…
In his Polish, Mickiewicz closely follows Dmochowski’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, II 1 – 2; in Richmond Lattimore’s English translation the passage reads:
Now the rest of the gods, and men who were lords of the chariots, slept night long, but the ease of sleep came not upon Zeus.
The effect here is clearly comic, and emphasizes once again the sheer down-to-earthness of Pan Tadeusz – if it is an epic, it is an epic about credible and compelling everyday characters like the Judge, the Warden, and the soldiers, not about gods and warriors of a remote and fabulous past.
Furthermore, it is also true that, as Czesław Miłosz pointed out, Pan Tadeusz possesses “all the features of a good novel.” It has richly drawn characters, plots and subplots, love intrigues, a feud, a political conspiracy, acts of violence – in short, many of the elements one would expect to find in novelistic prose. One of the many things Mickiewicz is doing in this poem is sweeping us up in a dramatic and gripping narrative.
Pan Tadeusz is also – many would say, is above all – a paean to a dying social world. For two hundred years or more, life in Poland-Lithuania had remained largely unaltered. Mores, the social hierarchy, ways of dressing – all had become codified and comfortable. This way of being, often referred to as “Sarmatianism,” promoted values such as individual liberty, respect for persons and for rank, courtesy and hospitality – virtues reflected in the poem in the Judge’s household, for instance. Yet at exactly the time of Mickiewicz’s youth, in the early years of the nineteenth century things rapidly changed. Mickiewicz, for instance, could remember older men in his neighborhood wearing the kontusz and żupan, the Old Polish costume that had existed since the sixteenth century. Yet in his own generation everyone now wore western clothing. Such changes are often explicitly commented upon by the characters in the book. The great frequency of the word “last” in Pan Tadeusz – it even appears in the subtitle – indicates Mickiewicz’s goal of capturing this way of life before it disappeared forever. In this sense, the book can be read as ethnography – a record of life-ways that, even at the time of writing twenty years after the book is set, would have largely disappeared. In this respect, it anticipates the much later novels of writers like Thomas Hardy, who found the novel to be an effective medium for capturing a particular way of life in a given community. Mickiewicz’s loving recreation of shared meals, coffee-making, mushroom-hunting, and even the Warden’s fly-swatting, bespeak a profound need to record a vanishing way of life.
In fact, in the poignant epilogue to Pan Tadeusz Mickiewicz writes lyrically about his retreat into childhood as he wrote the poem in the oppre
ssive atmosphere of the Polish émigré circles in Paris. And it should be mentioned that Mickiewicz displays stunning faculties of memory. Writing from exile about places, events, and customs from twenty years before, his descriptions are rich, full – and accurate. Indeed, critics have noted that even the details of nature are correct – plants, for instance, only flower in the book at the appropriate time of year.
The world that Mickiewicz so lovingly recreates is that of the Polish szlachta, or gentry. This is not the aristocracy – aristocratic characters, such as the Count and the late Pantler, weave in and out of the narrative, but they are not the main object of interest. The gentry were much less wealthy than the aristocracy, but were free (as opposed to the serfs who worked their estates for them). Some gentry were comfortably off – like the Judge in the story. Others, like the Dobrzyńskis, were impoverished. But, as mentioned above, every male member of the gentry had a vote (such rights by and large continued in regional parliaments under Russian rule), and every gentry family had its coat of arms, proving its standing and its history – see the discussion in the inn in Book IV. In the region where the book takes place another Sarmatian custom, as Mickiewicz explains in his notes, was that among the gentry there was a custom of assigning titles and referring to individuals by these titles rather than by their names. Some of the titles represent real positions, like the Judge and the retired Bailiff in the book; others, like Warden, were chosen somewhat at random, as an indicator of respect and standing.
Worthy of particular note is the figure of Jankiel, the Jewish innkeeper. As has been well documented, historically speaking, depictions of Jews in Polish literature were often unflattering. Jankiel is one of the earliest and most important exceptions to this tendency. Jankiel is portrayed as an honest, hardworking, peaceable man and, notably, a good patriotic Pole who has played an important part in the resistance to Russian rule. The dulcimer concert he plays in Book XII is one of the best-loved passages of the poem in Poland.