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:

    “...I, his wife, rested and was warmed in the sunlight of his loyal love, and glorious fame, and now, even though his beautiful life has gone out, it is as when some far off planet disappears from the heavens, the light of his great fame still falls upon and warms me.”
    —Julia Dent Grant (1825–1902)

    “Alas, we are the victims of advertisement. Those who taste the joys and sorrows of fame when they have passed forty, know how to look after themselves. They know what is concealed beneath the flowers, and what the gossip, the calumnies, and the praise are worth. But as for those who win fame when they are twenty, they know nothing, and are caught up in the whirlpool.”
    —Sarah Bernhardt (1845–1923)

    “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)