Another tale of star-crossed lovers

It’s hard, in Britain, to imagine a popular museum devoted to a single poem. The Polish city of Wrocław hosts just such a shrine. It celebrates Pan Tadeusz, the verse novel written in his Parisian exile by the poet, dramatist and freedom fighter Adam Mickiewicz in the early 1830s, and now taught as a keystone of collective identity to every Polish schoolchild. Even the idea of a ‘national epic’ sounds like a great big bore, especially as the action of this one turns on a sideshow in the Lithuanian backwoods during the Napoleonic wars, while ‘the wide world ran riot/ In blood and tears’. Certainly, no previous translation has done much to persuade readers of English that Mickiewicz’s boondocks yarn of feuding, boozing gentry possessed by ‘the devil of vengeance’ merited their reverence.

Now, in time for the centenary jamboree to mark the restoration of Polish sovereignty, comes a kind of miracle. Bill Johnston, celebrated as a translator of landmark Polish literature, has crafted a wondrously eloquent and entertaining new version of Pan Tadeusz. Over 450 never-flagging pages, he converts Mickiewicz’s 13-syllable rhyming lines into iambic couplets deployed with stupendous skill, grace and agility. Nimble half-rhymes, lithe enjambment and mischievous wordplay channel all the story’s humour and exuberance, and banish any risk of jingling monotony.

The plot of Pan Tadeusz unfolds in Russian-occupied Lithuania in 1811–12. Mickiewicz, then, had just entered his teens. Poland and Lithuania, those ‘sister nations’, greeted Napoleon as a potential saviour. The French emperor might help them erase the shame of their lands’ partition (between Russia, Prussia and Austria), and restore the ancient glories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.