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)

Read more about this topic:  Pan Tadeusz

Famous quotes containing the word fame:

    “It is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones.... Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,—a stone to a bone? “Here lies,”M”Here lies”;Mwhy do they not sometimes write, There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended?”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser Iscariots than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.”
    —Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)

    “The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects, of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)