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:
“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)
“Upon Saint Crispin’s day
Fought was this noble fray,
Which fame did not delay
To England to carry.
On when shall Englishmen
With such acts fill a pen,
Or England breed again
Such a King Harry?”
—Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
“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)