Jeremiah Curtin - Translations From Polish

Translations From Polish

According to the epitaph placed over Curtin's grave in Bristol, Vermont, by his erstwhile employer, the Smithsonian Institution, and written by his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Polish was but one of seventy (sic!) languages that "Jeremiah Curtin travel over the wide world... learn to speak." Curtin apparently knew little or no Polish before he began translating Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novel With Fire and Sword in 1888 at age fifty. Subsequently he rendered the other two volumes of the author's Trilogy, other works by Sienkiewicz, and in 1897 his Quo Vadis, "he handsome income from sale... gave him financial independence " and set the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, on its feet. Sienkiewicz himself appears to have been short-changed in his part of the profits from the translation of the best-selling Quo Vadis.

Later in 1897, Curtin's first meeting with Sienkiewicz, like his earlier first contact with the latter's writings, came about by sheer chance, in a hotel dining room at the Swiss resort of Ragatz. For the next nine years, until Curtin's death in 1906, the two men would be in continual contact through correspondence and personal meetings.

Also in 1897, during a Warsaw visit, Curtin learned from Wolff, of Gebethner and Wolff, Sienkiewicz's Polish publishers, that the Polish journalist and novelist Bolesław Prus, an acquaintance of Sienkiewicz, was as good a writer, and that none of Sienkiewicz's works excelled Prus' novel Pharaoh. Curtin read Pharaoh, enjoyed it and decided to translate it in the future.

Having both Polish and Russian interests, Curtin scrupulously avoided publicly favoring either people in their historic neighbors' quarrels (particularly since the Russian Empire had been in occupation of a third of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including Warsaw, since the latter part of the 18th century).

During an 1898 Warsaw visit, Curtin began translating Prus' Pharaoh. Polish friends had urged him to translate it, and he had himself found it "a powerful novel, well conceived and skillfully executed"; he declared its author a "deep and independent thinker." In September 1899, again in Warsaw—where, as often happened, Sienkiewicz was away—Curtin went ahead with his translation of Prus' historical novel. Wolff urged him to continue with Prus, calling him profounder than Sienkiewicz. During another Warsaw visit, in early 1900, while again waiting for Sienkiewicz to return from abroad, Curtin called on Prus.

In 1900 Curtin translated The Teutonic Knights by Sienkiewicz, the author's major historic novel about the Battle of Grunwald and its background.