Fame
All works of Mickiewicz including Pan Tadeusz are in the Polish language. He had been brought up in the culture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a multicultural state that had encompassed most of what today are the separate countries of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Numerous quotations from Pan Tadeusz are well known in translation, above all its opening lines:
| “ | Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie;
Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie, Kto cię stracił. |
” |
- Lithuania, my fatherland! You are like health;
- How much you must be valued, will only discover
- The one who has lost you.
-
- (translation by Katie Busch-Sorensen)
- O Lithuania, my country, thou
- Art like good health; I never knew till now
- How precious, till I lost thee.
-
- (translation by Kenneth R. Mackenzie)
- Lithuania, my country! You are as good health:
- How much one should prize you, he only can tell
- Who has lost you.
-
- (translation by Marcel Weyland)
- Oh Lithuania, my homeland,
- you are like health--so valued when lost
- beyond recovery; let these words now stand
- restoring you, redeeming exile's cost.
-
- (translation by Leonard Kress)
Read more about this topic: Pan Tadeusz
Famous quotes containing the word fame:
“I have made a very rude translation of the Seven against Thebes, and Pindar too I have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. I believe even the best things are not equal to their fame. Perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself,—or is not that what the poets themselves do? However, I have not done with Pindar yet.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Expenditure now attracts fame as conquest once did.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)