The patriotic Pan Tadeusz – Polish coffee, Polish frogs

Pan Tadeusz is mostly (mostly) not an obviously patriotic poem. One character claims that Polish coffee is the best, and at another point Mickiewicz tells us that Polish frogs sing the sweetest. Highly questionable sentiments.

At some point, though, the political undercurrent of the poem becomes clear. The story is set in the spring of 1812. Napoleon has appeared on the Polish border. French victory against Russia means, perhaps, freedom for Poland. The local story of the poem intersects with history.

The last canto of Pan Tadeusz (titled “Let Us Love One Another!”) describes “the last banquet in the old Polish style.” It’s a marvel. The plot, as such, is finished. The last canto has another purpose.

To begin with, a huge centerpiece, created as per the actual 18th century Polish cookbook The Perfect Cook:

Whipped cream and icing sugar white as snow
Covered the centrepiece, which seemed to show
A winter landscape.

Successive layers of icing melt, allowing the seasons to change. Next, royal beet soup, meat broth, sausage, caviar and:

The last of all, a rare and secret dish,
Consisted of a single uncut fish,
Fried at the head and roasted in the mid,
Its tail in a ragout with sauces hid.

The most remarkable section, hard to excerpt, is a dulcimer concert, followed by a polonaise, that embodies the finest elements and aspirations of Polish culture – a humanistic patriotism. The long section describing the dulcimer music, in translation, seems to me to mimic the tone and structure of the Eastern European wedding music that I’ve heard. I don’t see how its done. Maybe I’m imaging things. Anyway, the final pages really feel like the breathless party preceding the march to war. Here’s the end, toasts to:

Napoleon and the Generals of the host
Tadeusz, Zosia, and in turn the rest
Of the betrothed, and every present guest,
And all the friends of all the company,
And all the dead of hallowed memory.

And I was with them drinking wine and mead
And what I saw and heard all men may read.

That last couplet is the fairy tale ending. Pan Tadeusz resembles War and Peace in this regard – it ends on this lovely high note, before catastrophe strikes. Napoleon is crushed, Tadeusz and he Count are, presumably, killed or exiled, and Poland waits over a hundred years for independence. Mickiewicz himself more or less abandoned literature after Pan Tadeusz, spending the next twenty years roaming Europe, doing what he could for Polish independence.*

* Also, attending Goethe’s 80th birthday part and trying to seduce Margaret Fuller. Mickiewicz was an interesting fellow.

Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz - like rolling balls of wool

Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834) is the Polish national epic. That has a dreary sound to it, somehow - conjures images of bored schoolchildren memorizing patriotic passages - even though The Song of Roland, The Poem of the Cid, The Niebelungenlied, the great medieval national epics, are wonderful poems. They wouldn't have the status they do if they were boring.

Pan Tadeusz is hardly boring. It's set in the Grand Duchy of Lithuanaia (confusingly, in modern Belarus), amongst the Polish gentry. Young Master Tadeusz has just arrived from the university, to an estate that has not one but two lovely, marriageable ladies. The neighboring Count is his rival. Since it's a love quadrangle, the story ought to have a happy ending. One of the funniest scenes is during a bear hunt - Tadeusz and the Count both fire at the bear and miss, then both grab the same spear, then both run. These are not the usual epic heroics.

A lot of the long poem concerns itself with vivid descriptions of more or less ordinary life - hunting, mushroom picking, banquets. But there's also a lawsuit, a mysterious monk, and a battle against the Russians. A lot going on, actually. Pan Tadeusz is sort of a combination of a Scott novel, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Goethe's "domestic epic" Hermann and Dorothea.

Mickiewicz and Pushkin were friends and mutual admirers (the only other Mickiewicz I've read are English translations of Pushkin's translations from the Polish, a pointless exercise). Compared to Eugene Onegin, Pan Tadeusz is less satirical, less digressive. I think Pushkin's characterization is also a bit deeper, although Mickiewicz has some fine touches. Acknowledging the limits of judging by tranlation, Mickiewicz is Pushkin's peer in inventive metaphorical language. Here one of the heroines is feeding her chickens:

Bare-headed in her morning gown she stands
Holding a sieve uplifted in her hands.
The fowls run up to her: like rolling balls
Of wool, the ruffled hens; the cockerels
Come rowing with their wings o’er ridge and brake,
While on their heads their coral helmets shake,
And spread their sharp-spurred feet in either side.
...
Here amber beaks, there crests of coral rear
Like fishes that above the waves appear.
The thrust-out necks sway gently to and fro
Like lilies on the water’s surface. So
A thousand eyes like stars on Zosia flash.
Book V

Every canto has something as good as the "rolling balls of wool" and the chicken-head lilies.

I read a translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie, published by the Polish Cultural Foundation in London. The Polish was included, allowing me to see that the original and translation are both in regular rhyming couplets. That's about it. Another complete tranlsation is available in a PDF here.