Pan Tadeusz - Fame

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)

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Famous quotes containing the word fame:

    “Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
    A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown,
    Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
    And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.”
    —Thomas Gray (1716–1771)

    “but as an Eagle
    His cloudless thunderbolted on thir heads.
    So vertue giv’n for lost,
    Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d,
    Like that self-begott’n bird
    In the Arabian woods embost,
    That no second knows nor third,
    And lay e’re while a Holocaust,
    From out her ashie womb now teem’d
    Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
    When most unactive deem’d,
    And though her body die, her fame survives,
    A secular bird ages of lives.”
    —John Milton (1608–1674)

    “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)