The Surplus of Meaning

Adam Mickiewicz's long poem Pan Tadeusz (1834) has often enjoyed an almost sacrosanct status in Polish culture, as the national epic and pinnacle of poetic expression in the language. This elevated position is not reflected in its standing outside the country. In his own time, Mickiewicz was a minor celebrity in exile, especially in France and Russia. But he has not entered the European canon in an enduring way as a national champion on the level of Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, or even his Russian friend Alexander Pushkin.There are multiple reasons for this comparative lack of recognition.1 Underpinning them are marked differences in political and economic power, as Poland (or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) has been a middle country at best, and for all of Mickiewicz's lifetime was entirely absent from the map of Europe.This political subordination has defined Polish literature as a “small literature”—in the influential terms of critic Pascale Casanova—struggling for visibility in the ruling western European and North American “centers” of global literary space.2 Inherent in this position has been the persistent status of Polish as a language less often taught and learnt outside the country. In turn, this deficit has subjected Polish literature to the tyranny of translation, whereby the visibility of Polish literary works in the “centers” has depended on the availability of translations into “larger” languages such as English. And Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz has posed a very particular translation problem.The first challenge lies in the poem's form: almost five thousand rhyming couplets in the classical Polish Alexandrine line of thirteen syllables with a caesura after the seventh. In practice, this leaves the English-language translator with a choice between the monumental task of a verse translation and a plainer rendering in prose. A successful rhymed version would seem to require an Anglophone poet of Mickiewicz's stature—difficult to find with a knowledge of Polish. A prose translation risks losing the rhythmic qualities that give the poem much of its effect. Multiple translators have tried one approach or the other: among them, Maude Ashurst Biggs (unrhymed verse—1885), George Rapall Noyes (prose—1917), Watson Kirkconnell (rhymed verse—1962), and Kenneth R. MacKenzie (rhymed verse—1986). Some of these efforts remain more than serviceable, but most are out of print or written in what might seem to modern readers to be a fusty or excessively archaized English. In effect, Pan Tadeusz has been close to unavailable to the English-language reader.Two new translations published in recent years have sought to rectify this injustice—in verse by Bill Johnston (2018) and in prose by Christopher Adam Zakrzewski (2024). Both are successful in their own terms. Johnston's poetic rendering is a miracle of style, while Zakrzewski's version turns Mickiewicz's poem into a very readable novel. A comparison of the two brings to light some key aspects of the meaning of Pan Tadeusz as well as some wider dilemmas of the translator's task.Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz between 1832 and 1834 in Paris, having been exiled from his Lithuanian homeland by the Russian imperial authorities. The story is set during the earlier period of the Napoleonic wars among the Polish gentry in rural Lithuania, where two feuding families are brought together by marriage and the common patriotic aim of resisting Russian imperial occupation. The work abounds in incident, from lively plots of romance and political intrigue to digressions into mushroom hunting and scenes of frenetic action—among others, a bear hunt and a climactic battle against Russian troops.Interpreters of the poem have pointed to its harmonious blending of diverse genres and styles.3 It combines the epic and mock epic—drawing on both the classical and eighteenth-century traditions—with the historical novel, borrowing heavily from the example of Walter Scott. Mickiewicz's approach also includes a lyrical idealization of the recent past, suggesting the idyll genre of his original intention to evoke the lost world of Polish-Lithuanian gentry life from his own childhood.4 Yet the lyricism is tempered by irony, humor, parody, and affectionate caricature. Few of the characters are heroic; many are buffoonish or naïve (including the eponymous Tadeusz); and the narrator constantly undercuts their flights of fantasy—often comically—with ironic realism. The last two books of the poem include aspects of fairy tale, with a coming together of the community above its previous divisions in a culminating wedding banquet and polonaise.5 Moments of genuine pathos are mostly restricted to the famous opening invocation to the lost homeland and a brief epilogue—written later—framing the conditions of the work's composition in Parisian exile. The tone is generally light, somewhat in defiance of the poem's reputation as the national epic.6Yet many readers have also detected something deeper in Pan Tadeusz—what Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz would describe as a “metaphysical” dimension inherent in its “vindication of quotidian reality: the world of existence as an image of Pure Being.”7 For Miłosz, the poem's idealization of a childhood world of kitchen gardens, fences, fields, and forests represents a form of theodicy, suggesting the hand of a benevolent creator God in the “Earth-garden” of ordinary reality. Miłosz's reading is idiosyncratic, but other readers have also perceived something lying “behind” the text's literal descriptions of provincial life in a religiously-inflected, imaginative restoration of a lost past.8Poetry in particular—and literary writing in general—is clearly never reducible to the literal meanings of description, story, and ideas. The distinction of poetic language inheres in what philosopher Paul Ricoeur describes—more specifically in reference to metaphor—as its “surplus of meaning.”9 Through figurative devices and the play of words themselves, literary texts facilitate “the opening up and discovery of a field of reality other than that which ordinary language lays bare.” This abundance of meaning outside the pure referentiality of descriptive language may even extend beyond the linguistic sign itself into “noncognitive and emotional” dimensions.10 The form of a poem imparts a series of impressions in excess of its signifying functions—or, rather, these two dimensions of meaning are bound together in an indivisible whole. As the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky put it, “they sanctify each other reciprocally— it is an association of soul and body. Break the vessel, and the liquid will leak out.”11This warning as to the indispensability of form would seem to recommend Bill Johnston's choice to translate Pan Tadeusz into verse. In practice, this demands a process characterized by linguist Roman Jakobson as “creative transposition”—not mere substitution but a recasting of the work “from one poetic shape to another.”12 Rather than attempting to imitate the Polish Alexandrine in English, Johnston—like many other translators of poetry—finds a native “metrical equivalent” for it.13 The natural choice in this case is iambic pentameter, the rough counterpart of the Alexandrine in its dominant status within the English-language poetic tradition.Rhyme presents an even more formidable challenge. Polish is richer in its rhyming resources than English —for instance, in abundant grammatical rhymes, which Mickiewicz often employs. Accordingly, Johnston does not insist on perfect rhyme throughout the translation, but frequently uses half-rhymes based on consonance or assonance. One reviewer has criticized Johnston's interspersing of “true rhyme” among these half-rhymes, arguing that this creates a jarring inconsistency of effect.14 But Mickiewicz's own use of the Alexandrine couplets is variegated, so the variations here perhaps help to convey the supple, unfussy, but controlled mastery of form of the original. More broadly, rhyme tends to be a more important part of the wider rhythmic effect in the weakly accented Polish language, while the stronger stresses of syllabotonic English verse partly compensate for any disparities in rhyme.15Overall, Johnston's translation is a stunning success. In roughly equivalent metrical forms, he captures much of the elusive spirit of Mickiewicz's work—including its humor (the rhymes help to convey comic bathos)—while also remaining impressively faithful to its literal meanings. The very high degree of difficulty inevitably brings a certain unevenness of effect, with the many outstanding passages occasionally mingling with more debatable choices.The imperfection of verse translations has led some translators to propose alternative approaches—in particular, versions in prose. Vladimir Nabokov famously insisted on the impossibility of translating Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin (published in 1833, a year before Pan Tadeusz), producing his own eccentric version in a mixture of unrhymed verse and prose.16 In Nabokov's view, a poem's surplus of meaning is always untranslatable, as it is too deeply rooted in the specific characteristics of individual poetic geniuses and their languages. Even at their very best, systems of metrical equivalence merely serve to produce new works that are very different from their sources. Therefore, the only responsible solution is a closer rendering of the literal meaning of a poem, renouncing any claims to its form.Christopher Adam Zakrzewski broadly takes this approach in his prose version of Pan Tadeusz. In his translator's preface, he concedes the cost: since “the style is the poem,” prosification must obscure its ineffable meaning. He presents the purpose of his translation as both to provide a “closer” and “readable” version for modern English-language readers and to inspire new translations in verse. His translation thus appears almost as a stand-in for an imagined future rendering that would definitively recreate the work in poetic form. (He describes Johnston's version as a “noble attempt”). More peculiarly, he contrasts the “purity” of Mickiewicz's language with the specters of contemporary “political correctness,” “inclusive language,” “hyper-modernist trends,” and “post-Marxian . . . ideological thinking.” He presents his own work as translator, therefore, as part of a struggle not just with the elusiveness of the text's meanings, but—more grandly—against “the relentless and universal rape and truncation of language” supposedly characteristic of the present time.Leaving these culture war claims to one side, Zakrzewski's task in translation itself is deceptively difficult. To turn Pan Tadeusz into a type of novel, he must engage in his own processes of adaptation and transformation, finding equivalents of register and tone to render the poem convincingly in this new form. Like Johnston's, Zakrzewski's translation is thus a creative transposition of the poem—into prose instead of verse. In the terms of translation theory, both versions are “domesticating” rather than “foreignizing,” seeking to bring the text to the modern English-language reader in accessible forms.17 Both generally avoid the archaisms that feature prominently in earlier translations of the poem. Both also strive to preserve something of the work's stylistic heterogeneity.Zakrzewski's Pan Tadeusz works surprisingly well as a novel, despite several obstacles in the source material. On the surface, as Miłosz observed, the work is derivative and unremarkable in its narrative and themes: a “banally plotted tale à la Walter Scott.”18 The characterization and insights into the protagonists’ psychology and motivations are sometimes superficial. Unmoored from verse, the dialogue may seem stilted. Yet Zakrzewski succeeds admirably in finding an attractive register in English prose that fits the work—at once elegant, light, poetic, and unpretentious. In doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to the body of resources available to bring Mickiewicz closer to the English-language reader, both in classrooms and beyond.To compare the two translations in closer detail, a single representative passage from the poem's famous opening invocation must suffice: Tymczasem przenoś moję duszę utęsknionąDo tych pagórków leśnych, do tych łąk zielonych,Szeroko nad błękitnym Niemnem rozciągnionych;Do tych pól malowanych zbożem rozmaitem,Wyzłacanych pszenicą, posrebrzanych żytem;Gdzie bursztynowy świerzop, gryka jak śnieg biała,Gdzie panieńskim rumieńcem dzięcielina pała,A wszystko przepasane jakby wstęgą, miedząZieloną, na niej z rzadka ciche grusze siedzą.Meanwhile, bear my yearning heart to those richly timbered hills, to those green meadows stretched far and wide along blue Niemen's banks. Bear it hence to that particolored patchwork of fields, daubed gold with wheat, silvered with rye, where the rape glows amber yellow, the buckwheat shimmers white as the snow, the clover mantles with a maidenly blush, and all this belted round by a green boundary strip where here and yon a solitary pear-tree stands. (Zakrzewski, p. 1). . . Meanwhile, transport my yearning soulBack to those wooded hills, those meadows wideAnd green, that line the pale blue Niemen's side;Those fields adorned with many-colored grainWhere golden wheat and silvery rye both shine,Where clover with its maidenly red blush,White duckwheat, and amber rapeseed all grow lush,Ribboned round by a green field boundary whereA tranquil pear tree nestles here and there. (Johnston, pp. 1–2)Both versions reflect processes of creative transposition. Zakrzewski's prose is far from a slavishly literal rendering. He includes poetic effects absent from the original, thus compensating to some degree for the lack of verse—for example, in the alliterations and rhythmic cadences of “particolored patchwork” and “mantles with a maidenly blush.” These are evidently very intentional choices, as the translation frequently departs from the literal meaning to achieve equivalent effects of its own—almost like a poetic rendition. The narrator's “heart”—and not his “soul” (“dusza”)—is yearning. “Richly timbered hills” elaborate on Mickiewicz's “wooded” (“leśne”) ones. The pear-tree are “solitary” rather than “quiet” (“ciche”)—or “tranquil,” as Johnston has them. The phrase “here and yon” is a less obtrusive version of the archaism “hither and yon.” On the whole, the passage—and indeed most of the translation—achieves an attractively elevated tone without pomposity. The prose is poetic, but also very “readable,” in accordance with Zakrzewski's aims.Johnston's version of the same passage exemplifies both his stylistic success and its tradeoffs. The iambic pentameter and rhyme are not always precise—intentionally so, as Johnston explains. The seventh line has an extra syllable despite the masculine rhyme—an unusual practice in English poetry. But the meter gives a gathering, breathless momentum to the painterly images linked by patterns of sound, embodying the speaker's emotion in a register beyond literal meaning. Most of the couplets are perfectly rhymed, with the exception of the harmonious consonance of “grain” and “shine.” The white buckwheat loses its simile of “snow” (“śnieg”), while also taking the form of a particular variety known in some contexts in English as “duckwheat,” perhaps to reflect Mickiewicz's use of botanical regionalisms (this reviewer lacks expertise to assess this choice, but Polish criticism has long debated the correctness of Mickiewicz's own plant names19).The passage demonstrates an impressive combination of consistent versification and generally high precision. Indeed, this is the towering achievement of Johnston's translation, as he forges thousands of mostly euphonious couplets without significant departures from the literal sense or even from the arrangement of that sense within individual lines. Such accuracy distinguishes his work from previous rhymed translations of the poem. At the same time, the iambs and rhymes are sufficiently intact as to reward reading aloud as a reconstructed poetic experience of Mickiewicz. As Johnston notes, the imperfect rhymes prevent a singsong monotony, while the naturally stronger rhythms of accented English compensate for the accompanying irregularity. The result is of course not the sound of Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz itself, but a sustained evocation of its poetic mood and form, recreated in the material of the English language.Part of what lies “behind” the words of Pan Tadeusz—its “metaphysical” meaning, as Miłosz put it—is a yearning for the landscapes, places, and people of a lost childhood world. In Mickiewicz's case, this loss was particularly acute in the definitive context of his political exile. But the wider notion of a return in memory or imagination to the unrepeatable sensual impressions of the past is accessible to all readers. In this sense, all readers are exiles from a lost world. Both translations evoke this atmosphere to some degree, recreating the story, setting, and emotional tenor of Mickiewicz's work.Zakrzewski's version does so by turning Pan Tadeusz into a historical novel or romance with shades of epic, idyll, and fairy tale. Yet the deeper sense of Mickiewicz's work is still inseparable from the surplus of meaning inherent in his verse. In Jakobson's terms, this meaning lies in the “poeticity” of the “word felt as a word,” tied to other words through metaphor, rhyme, and rhythmical structures that the reader experiences as physical stimuli beyond cognitive processes.20 Zakrzewski includes some of this poetic stimulus in his balanced prose, but his translation cannot compete with the rhythmic performance of Johnston's verse, as imperfect as it necessarily must be.The meaning of Mickiewicz's work will forever be sealed in the Polish original, but Johnston's brilliant transposition of it remains the best approximation in English.