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:

    “That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
    Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
    Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze
    Of sunrise gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;
    An epitaph of glory for the tomb
    Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
    Great People! as the sands shalt thou become;
    Thy growth is swift as morn, when night must fade;
    The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.”
    —Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)

    “I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
    Those undreamt accidents that have made me
    Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
    Being but a part of ancient ceremony
    Notorious, till all my priceless things
    Are but a post the passing dogs defile.”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    “There are names written in her immortal scroll at which Fame blushes!”
    —William Hazlitt (1778–1830)