⭐⭐⭐⭐
A short feminist novel set in 1870s Warsaw, published in English translation by Ohio University Press for the first time in 2018. Marta is a young upper-middle class woman whose husband has just died, leaving her almost no money. She discovers that her perfunctory education in ladies' accomplishments has not equipped her for the limited range of jobs available to women - while working-class women of her age already have years of experience under their belts - and she struggles with increasing desperation to support herself and her small daughter.
Eliza Orzeszkowa is most famous in Poland for On the Niemen (1888), a longer, rural, novel which is on the school curriculum. (It has so far only had a self-published translation to English.) So far as I can tell, Marta is the first new professionally-published English translation of any Orzeszkowa work for decades, which is quite exciting if you want to read Polish classics in English. (There was previously The Forsaken (1980?) and The Argonauts (1901).)
Marta has been variously described as melodrama, as social realism and as naturalistic. Eliza Orzeszkowa was part of the Polish Positivist cultural movement, of realist writing influenced by Dickens, Balzac and Zola, of watchful stoicism about Poland's occupied status, and, as was was popular in much of 19th century Europe, middle-class advocacy for hard work and social and technological progress. The Positivist outlook was also a pragmatic way of staying safe whilst maintaining a public voice, especially under the more repressive Tsarist regime that ruled Warsaw and the rural area where Orzeszkowa lived for most of her adult life. (Somewhat greater latitude was possible in the Austro-Hungarian zone in the south.) As Prof. Grażyna J. Kozaczka explains in the introduction to Marta,
"The Polish intellectual elite, the intelligentsia, found Positivist ideas very attractive as they justified the rejection of military actions in favor of refocusing attention on rebuilding Polish society and ensuring that cultural connections persisted in the nation split among three separate foreign empires. Positivists set their goal on organic work that involved using only legal means to achieve the cultural and economic growth of Polish society."
Marta is based on a "there but for the grace of god go I" scenario. Some years earlier, Orzeszkowa had taken the unusual step of divorcing her husband, and her opportunities were also limited by the ruling Russian regime's restrictions on Poles who, like her, had supported the 1863 uprising. But due to her considerable language skills, she was able to support herself with translation, writing and publishing work. She was aware that similar financial independence was not possible for most of her female peers.
In the years immediately after it was written, Marta had a significant impact in Polish and other Continental European languages. The protagonist's situation was commoner in Poland than in some other countries due to "the loss of estates due to punitive confiscation or poor management in the changing economy", as Kozaczka explains in the introduction; and that it was soon translated into, among others, "Russian, German, Czech, Swedish, Dutch, and even Esperanto". Borkowska says that it "became the bible of German feminist movements".
This pan-European impact was probably enhanced because, as Kozaczka notes, the Polish setting is not strongly emphasised. Locations are mentioned, but the novel's subject is the unprepared woman struggling to stay afloat not in Warsaw in particular, but in the city in general, which "takes on a menacing quality" now she is unprotected by her husband: the late-19th century city a-bustle in the process of industrialising and commercialising.
"the great city assumed the form of a huge hive in which a multitude of human beings moved, surging with life and joining in a race. Each one had his own place for work and for rest, his own goals to reach, and his own tools to forge a way through the crowd."
"Here, as everywhere else, the degree of a worker’s well-being is in direct relation to the excellence of what he produces." [Whilst these days, at the level of work Marta is trying to obtain, consistency, presenteeism and promptness are probably more important provided there is basic competence.]
A handful of features pop out as locally distinctive. There are some attitudes and thoughts more Catholic than Protestant, although none which changes the story. The most noticeable was the preference, even in shops selling goods of feminine interest such as haberdashery, for dapper male staff - who were considered good for business because they were attractive to wealthy female customers; this is also a major feature of The Doll by Bolesław Prus (1890), the greatest Positivist classic. (These men were expected to flirt, but not *too* much.) It contrasts with the popular figure of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century shopgirl in Britain, and Zola's The Ladies' Paradise.
As someone from a professional middle-class background whose capacity for work and earning is, for health reasons, not what I once thought it would be, I expected I would feel a connection and sympathy with Marta, regardless of the story's overt didacticism and its fairly basic style of writing. I also anticipated it would be interesting as a historical document.
In a translation where one is reading both the author and the translators for the first time, and the translators are also quite new to book-length fiction, it's not easy to be sure how much of the style reflects the original. However, the small amount of commentary I've been able access in English suggests that the flaws were in Orzeszkowa's writing. "Her first works are not very well-written and may only be of interest as testimony to the author's sympathy for the trends of modernization,", says Grażyna Borkowska in Ten Centuries of Polish Literature (2004) (p. 182). Czesław Miłosz, in his History of Polish Literature (1969, rev.1983) implies that although novels were her most famous output, they were not, perhaps, her forte: "their technique is old-fashioned and perhaps not up to the level of the exceptional mind which she revealed in her correspondence with the most eminent intellectuals of Poland and Europe" (p.303). She recognised this herself, saying in one letter, "If I was born with a creative faculty, it was a mediocre one. That spark was a little enlivened by considerable intellectual capabilities, and great emotional capabilities, perhaps too much for one heart." (p.314).
Whatever one thinks of Orzeszkowa's writing, she had an interesting life and mind: perhaps a biography would be more interesting than some of her novels, and she may have been better-suited to non-fiction writing. But novels were where the opportunities lay in her day. Between the lines of Miłosz's (and others) descriptions of her, I'm seeing an intellectual writing "accessible" fiction to earn money to live off, and because it got her message across:
"the most open to new intellectual trends, and until her death in 1910 she reacted with understanding to currents which seemed to the Positivists just madness" (p.304)
"her abundant literary production could be qualified as 'populist' although the term has not been used in Polish criticism" (pp.304-305).
The simple style made it readable on occasions when I might have been too tired for more complex writing, and - though it's much long since I read Frances Hodgson Burnett to be wholly confident of similarities - I often thought of A Little Princess when I started reading Marta, not least during the scenes in her new, spartan accommodation. Although unlike a children's book, one shouldn't necessarily expect a happy ending. I always felt that likelihood that made it better and more honest. This feeling was captured by some lines in an article about burnout that went viral the weekend just before I finished writing this post: "In the movie version of this story, this man moves to an island to rediscover the good life, or figures out he loves woodworking and opens a shop. But that’s the sort of fantasy solution that makes millennial burnout so pervasive." Yes, that kind of stuff gets annoying and obscures real problems. I found myself preferring this 19th century story to many contemporary ones, because it seems truer to those who fall through safety-nets, whilst so much recent material still assumes a greater level of security than actually exists now for plenty of people, as compared with 10-20 years ago.
This was one of those novels in which the author seems to be warming up, as the writing becomes more gripping further into the story. Its trajectory follows Marta through increased levels of need, from early stages which will probably be most recognisable to other people originally from comfortable backgrounds, such as trying to refuse wages from a kind employer for work of a low standard, although she had put a lot of time into it and needs the money. It is about the process by which such principles are whittled away as she becomes better acquainted with real need and what it entails. She learns to work backbreakingly hard for a while and survive on a couple of hours' sleep a night for weeks doing two jobs. But because her skills are few, and training opportunities non-existent, there is further to fall.
As the novel's crescendo built towards the end, I found a description of a state of mind I hadn't seen written about so recognisably before - it was possibly the character's background as well as the timing. Of moments of discovering the operation of a clawing, reflex-level, almost spasmodic desperation for the means of further survival - who knew little bits of money could matter that much, not that they looked like little bits any more - in which former care about manners and propriety is sunk and unfelt; and how it feels depersonalised, dreamlike and surreal, for this is not an existence one ever expected - expectations still lodged in a subconscious quite untrained for these circumstances, built for a life in which requests would mostly be answered and sometimes not even necessary. I read much of Marta around the same time as Vernon Subutex 1 - very contemporary but also dealing with a formerly comfortable character's descent into destitution - and for a few days the two novels were a small chorus, showing a situation which is a social problem, but one not seen as so bad now, because these people have been more privileged in the past, and there will always be some decisions people will say they could have made differently (albeit more so in Vernon's case than Marta's).
Kozaczka makes a powerful argument which quotes Kelleter and Mayer from Melodrama!: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood: “the melodramatic mode has always lent itself to stories of power struggles and to enactments of socio-cultural processes of marginalization and stratification.” There are plenty of occasions when seeing real life in melodramatic terms can be positively disadvantageous on a personal level. But extrapolating from this cultural relationship between melodrama and inequality both prompted me to re-evaluate forms and tropes that have often been derided in more recent times - and to consider that rather than being antiquated, it may be a form and tendency *increasingly* suitable for arts in the contemporary landscape of growing inequality and political polarisation, manifest climate change and mass population movements - shaking up the background complacency remaining after the stability and optimism of recent decades in most Western countries. (The news has already become more melodramatic over the past two and a half years - illustrating some of the drawbacks of melodrama as a real-life format, full of, in Kozaczka's words about the form in general, "the unambiguously drawn conflict between good and evil set on the stage of a “modern metropolis”; the effusive expressions of feelings; and the presence of stock characters who may not have deep “psychological complexity,”¹⁹ such as wealthy villains and beleaguered heroines whose virtue is constantly tested—should not to be discounted altogether.")
Despite what I thought when starting Marta - and my reservations in recommending it for anything other than historical interest - the style and the melodrama doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to other recent English readers either: several, on GR and one in this blog post by a judge for the 2019 US Best Translated Book Award, have also found the book more involving and affecting than expected - so there seems to be something about it; maybe it's not just me.
(Read Oct-Nov 2018; reviewed Jan 2019. The review on Goodreads.
Showing posts with label history: 19th century. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history: 19th century. Show all posts
4 January 2019
A Christmas Carol and Other Writings by Charles Dickens, introduction & notes by Michael Slater
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This Guardian article on Dickens and Christmas nudged me into re-reading A Christmas Carol. The introduction to this Penguin edition even starts with the same anecdote, about the costermonger's daughter who asked “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
I rarely re-read books, not least because there are too many classics I wish I'd read, and which I haven't yet read once, to launch myself into a project of re-reading. But also because I know that re-reading is more time-consuming both to do and to write about, because it's not just about the book and the current reading experience, but a reconsideration of what I'd previously got out of the story. (This post is, for the moment, just about A Christmas Carol and not the other Christmas Writings. People's appetite for Christmas material is probably already waning on 4th January, and I don't expect to finish this whole collection by Twelfth Night.)
The early pages of A Christmas Carol remained so familiar that I thought it might be basically impossible to review the book. It was simply itself and that's how it was. Goodness knows how many times I'd read them when I was growing up - I'd been given two different editions as presents before the age of ten, and would have opened and browsed them frequently. The only surprises were that some of Scrooge's anti-Christmas rants were genuinely funny, and that he was suffering from a cold throughout proceedings. However, I found it less familiar once I hit Stave Two, and more possible to think about it as I would another book, although every now and again, there were occasional sentences that had resounding familiarity from childhood, because they'd just got into my head, like "who and what are you?" or because they were probably captions to illustrations in other editions.
It was hard to tell whether this is an effect of my own early habituation to the text, or if I was spotting genuine influence at work, but there is a tone here which seems like the essence of British children's writing, especially, though not only, children's fantasy writing, and fantasy stories which aim to have cross-age appeal. Did Dickens essentially invent it? Or did he simply popularise it so that almost everyone since has been influenced via his work? Probably its greatest contemporary exponent is Neil Gaiman - including with that storyteller voice and occasional authorial breaking of the fourth wall that has become connected with the trust many readers have in his public persona (a clause which I feel could be saying equally about Dickens or Gaiman). I don't read much in the way of contemporary children's or YA, but it's also the tone A.L. Kennedy was going for in her Little Prince spin-off, The Little Snake, which I read a few months ago.
Often the sentences seemed astonishingly modern - noticeably more of them would work in contemporary writing than would sentences from, for example, Henry Fielding, written a century earlier. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming popularity of the Carol which has led a huge readership and reuse, often unwitting, of many of the phrasings. I did not find myself struck by modernity of wording in the same way when I read the less popular Hard Times a couple of years earlier. But just when I was marvelling at all this, of course there would come along some paragraph really quite antiquated and tangled to 21st century ears, showing that this is indeed still a work of 1843.
What never would have occurred to me as a kid is that Scrooge is essentially forced through a rapid course of psychotherapy in order to effect personality change - only he didn't seek it out himself. (Did Freud read much Dickens?) Its transformative outcome in either three days or one, depending how you measure time in the book, is one that promoters of accelerated programmes like the Hoffmann Process can probably only dream of. He is made to examine how the past made him who he is, including a number of painful moments which reawaken a dormant capacity for a variety of emotions; he is shown the adverse effects he has on others, and his separation from what are considered healthy social norms; and then to reinforce it all, just in case his repentance - to use a term from religion that would have been recognisable to early Victorians - is not yet deep and sincere, he is forced to look in the eye the probable future consequences of his current way of life. His response to the final Spirit is basically the idea of psychological integration: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."
The main, intended, message of A Christmas Carol is one of charity, and, ultimately, in tandem with Dickens' other works, the need to improve economic equality. However, I think that alongside this it also ends up showing lavish material consumption (via spending rather than hoarding of money) as a sign of being good-hearted. (Picking out unhelpful influences I absorbed from books and films when I was younger is, for me, an inevitable part of revisiting them. In some cases these influences occurred because I didn't properly understand the wider context or social norms beyond the work, but in the case of A Christmas Carol I think it's something the text in its many forms has actually put into the wider Anglo-American culture. 'Moderation in all things', or lagom to use the Swedish term increasingly fashionable in English, is not what it's about.) Whilst Scrooge is possibly malnourished himself, living on gruel to save money, Scrooge's nephew's house evidently has more than anyone could ever need. Bob Cratchit definitely needed a substantial pay rise and decent heating at work. (Which I think of all the more keenly knowing some of my own ancestors were unhealthy Victorian clerks, and another a milliner like one of the daughters.) But his Christmas dinner sounds very nice as it was - and would he have even been able to cook that giant turkey? Would the local ovens have had space for a thing like that, which would have normally been bought by a wealthy household? Would it have cost them more to cook and delayed neighbours' dinners by taking up communal oven space? I guess in an age of extreme wealth inequality there is lavishness and there is poverty, and Dickens' own life story had a hand in how he showed this. Issues of the later 20th and 21st century - of prevalent commercial and media pressures to overconsume leading to stress and overspending, and of ecological depletion - were certainly not on the radar of the Hungry Forties, when mouthwatering accounts of mountains of food could provide thrills and comfort to poorer readers who were scraping by, much as the Cratchits were. Slater's introduction refers to real letters readers sent to Dickens also saying how much they loved the scene of the family's dinner. Which, it’s interesting to see, includes a Christmas pudding cooked in the laundry copper - would that affect the taste? (I assume the name 'Cratchit' is supposed to have a scraping-by sort of sound and perhaps to echo Tiny Tim's crutch, but its echoes of 'crotchety' and 'crabbit' mean it also sounds ill-natured in a way that emphatically does not suit Bob and his family.)
The abundance of works like this one, showing great positive change in difficult people, can also lead to frustration over the years, as one gradually discovers that, in the reality of adult life, people do not necessarily change and 'grow' as much as would be helpful - but that is hardly peculiar to A Christmas Carol.
However, in terms of evaluating A Christmas Carol by modern mores, I suppose one can't much fault Dickens on healthy eating! Often in the 19th century, meat and carbohydrates were valued over vegetables, which could be seen as a food for the poor. (No sprouts to spoil the Cratchits' dinner!) Yet a paragraph this ecstatic about veg and fruit (Dickens even sexualises it somewhat) could only fit these days into food or travel writing; anywhere else it would sound like a parodic escape from a public health campaign - normally it is cakes and chocolate that are extolled this way:
There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.
The notes in this edition seem very good. There is very little in the way of material so obvious it's patronising, and only a couple of things missed out which could have done with notes: " a twice-turned gown" and " like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" (in 2018 the combination of lobsters and basements made one think of Jordan Peterson fans; goodness knows what greater significance it had in 1843).
Something I keep mulling over more generally about Dickens is how he was, in his day, so effective in his social reform agenda, and so well-loved by readers, whereas fiction doing the same now - not least because he's done it before - easily comes across as either mawkish, or written by and for a particular small audience (which has in the past couple of years come to be called 'liberal elites'). As far as I can work out, reasons for this on a larger scale would have included the reform-mindedness of some 19th century parliaments, the prevalence of some strands of Christianity, and the abundance of cheap energy fuelled industrialisation which required better education and thereby societal participation of workers. Whereas nowadays many people are aggrieved about declining standards of living, making them feel, en masse, less inclined to share, and the economic underpinnings have a different trajectory. (Not that Dickens didn't have opponents, of course. The introduction mentions that the Westminster Review condemned him, in June 1844, for his ignorance of political economy and the ‘laws’ of supply and demand: ‘Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them – for, unless there were turkeys and punch in surplus, some one must go without – is a disagreeable reflection kept wholly out of sight [by Dickens].’ But this was a predictable reaction from Utilitarian extremists. ('Utilitarian extremists' seems somehow an absurd phrase now, if utilitarianism is an abstract idea from introductory philosophy courses, but evidently they were a thing!) Yet although the sight of the poor was surely more familiar to the wealthy of the 18th and 19th century than to their 21st century contemporaries in many western cities, people were shocked by reports on working and living conditions - Earlier in the year [1843] he, like Elizabeth Barrett and many others, had been appalled by the brutal revelations of the Second Report (Trades and Manufactures) of the Children’s Employment Commission set up by Parliament.. Were many shocked this way, or were plenty of others inured? There was evidently some shift of ideas and sentiment which I've not really read about, and of which Dickens was no doubt part - it was not just underlying economic factors, even if they are the growth medium - which made those with power gradually start caring more and doing more. The biggest change was the post-WWII welfare state, but there was a broad trajectory of improvement over the century or so before that. Something I'd like to read more about.
----
What Christmas is as We Grow Older is a short piece Dickens wrote in 1851 at the age of 39. The introduction explains the background: for some years Dickens had been struggling with memories of family members and friends who had died, and he had started to find Christmas increasingly sad because of this. This article is a kind of resolution in which he concludes that it is fine and right to think of them as well as of those present, and to remember youthful ambitions unfulfilled as well as enjoying what is happening now. (Although probably the latter had been easier for him, as a successful man.) It mirrors the integration he'd written about Scrooge experiencing, but after he'd had more struggles of his own that marred his wish to find Christmas special. It shows how much death it was normal for someone of that age to have experienced at that age in the Victorian era (very different from now, though I thought of one good friend who, quite recently, at the same age, lost a much-loved parent), and that regardless of its being a universal experience then, and despite Dickens' religious belief, it was still a struggle. I'm sure this is the sort of writing that makes some people scoff at Dickens' sentimentality (the bit about child angels especially); and I couldn't help but speculate that it might have annoyed people who knew the less pleasant sides of Dickens' character - yet overall I found the piece incredibly moving; it instilled a sense of reverence, and before the end I cried in a way few books have ever provoked (not just welling up a bit, the actually-need-a-handkerchief sort) and couldn't read anything else straight afterwards.
(Read Dec 2018 - Jan 2019; reviewed January 2019. The review on Goodreads.)
This Guardian article on Dickens and Christmas nudged me into re-reading A Christmas Carol. The introduction to this Penguin edition even starts with the same anecdote, about the costermonger's daughter who asked “Mr Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”
I rarely re-read books, not least because there are too many classics I wish I'd read, and which I haven't yet read once, to launch myself into a project of re-reading. But also because I know that re-reading is more time-consuming both to do and to write about, because it's not just about the book and the current reading experience, but a reconsideration of what I'd previously got out of the story. (This post is, for the moment, just about A Christmas Carol and not the other Christmas Writings. People's appetite for Christmas material is probably already waning on 4th January, and I don't expect to finish this whole collection by Twelfth Night.)
The early pages of A Christmas Carol remained so familiar that I thought it might be basically impossible to review the book. It was simply itself and that's how it was. Goodness knows how many times I'd read them when I was growing up - I'd been given two different editions as presents before the age of ten, and would have opened and browsed them frequently. The only surprises were that some of Scrooge's anti-Christmas rants were genuinely funny, and that he was suffering from a cold throughout proceedings. However, I found it less familiar once I hit Stave Two, and more possible to think about it as I would another book, although every now and again, there were occasional sentences that had resounding familiarity from childhood, because they'd just got into my head, like "who and what are you?" or because they were probably captions to illustrations in other editions.
It was hard to tell whether this is an effect of my own early habituation to the text, or if I was spotting genuine influence at work, but there is a tone here which seems like the essence of British children's writing, especially, though not only, children's fantasy writing, and fantasy stories which aim to have cross-age appeal. Did Dickens essentially invent it? Or did he simply popularise it so that almost everyone since has been influenced via his work? Probably its greatest contemporary exponent is Neil Gaiman - including with that storyteller voice and occasional authorial breaking of the fourth wall that has become connected with the trust many readers have in his public persona (a clause which I feel could be saying equally about Dickens or Gaiman). I don't read much in the way of contemporary children's or YA, but it's also the tone A.L. Kennedy was going for in her Little Prince spin-off, The Little Snake, which I read a few months ago.
Often the sentences seemed astonishingly modern - noticeably more of them would work in contemporary writing than would sentences from, for example, Henry Fielding, written a century earlier. Perhaps this is due to the overwhelming popularity of the Carol which has led a huge readership and reuse, often unwitting, of many of the phrasings. I did not find myself struck by modernity of wording in the same way when I read the less popular Hard Times a couple of years earlier. But just when I was marvelling at all this, of course there would come along some paragraph really quite antiquated and tangled to 21st century ears, showing that this is indeed still a work of 1843.
What never would have occurred to me as a kid is that Scrooge is essentially forced through a rapid course of psychotherapy in order to effect personality change - only he didn't seek it out himself. (Did Freud read much Dickens?) Its transformative outcome in either three days or one, depending how you measure time in the book, is one that promoters of accelerated programmes like the Hoffmann Process can probably only dream of. He is made to examine how the past made him who he is, including a number of painful moments which reawaken a dormant capacity for a variety of emotions; he is shown the adverse effects he has on others, and his separation from what are considered healthy social norms; and then to reinforce it all, just in case his repentance - to use a term from religion that would have been recognisable to early Victorians - is not yet deep and sincere, he is forced to look in the eye the probable future consequences of his current way of life. His response to the final Spirit is basically the idea of psychological integration: "I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future."
The main, intended, message of A Christmas Carol is one of charity, and, ultimately, in tandem with Dickens' other works, the need to improve economic equality. However, I think that alongside this it also ends up showing lavish material consumption (via spending rather than hoarding of money) as a sign of being good-hearted. (Picking out unhelpful influences I absorbed from books and films when I was younger is, for me, an inevitable part of revisiting them. In some cases these influences occurred because I didn't properly understand the wider context or social norms beyond the work, but in the case of A Christmas Carol I think it's something the text in its many forms has actually put into the wider Anglo-American culture. 'Moderation in all things', or lagom to use the Swedish term increasingly fashionable in English, is not what it's about.) Whilst Scrooge is possibly malnourished himself, living on gruel to save money, Scrooge's nephew's house evidently has more than anyone could ever need. Bob Cratchit definitely needed a substantial pay rise and decent heating at work. (Which I think of all the more keenly knowing some of my own ancestors were unhealthy Victorian clerks, and another a milliner like one of the daughters.) But his Christmas dinner sounds very nice as it was - and would he have even been able to cook that giant turkey? Would the local ovens have had space for a thing like that, which would have normally been bought by a wealthy household? Would it have cost them more to cook and delayed neighbours' dinners by taking up communal oven space? I guess in an age of extreme wealth inequality there is lavishness and there is poverty, and Dickens' own life story had a hand in how he showed this. Issues of the later 20th and 21st century - of prevalent commercial and media pressures to overconsume leading to stress and overspending, and of ecological depletion - were certainly not on the radar of the Hungry Forties, when mouthwatering accounts of mountains of food could provide thrills and comfort to poorer readers who were scraping by, much as the Cratchits were. Slater's introduction refers to real letters readers sent to Dickens also saying how much they loved the scene of the family's dinner. Which, it’s interesting to see, includes a Christmas pudding cooked in the laundry copper - would that affect the taste? (I assume the name 'Cratchit' is supposed to have a scraping-by sort of sound and perhaps to echo Tiny Tim's crutch, but its echoes of 'crotchety' and 'crabbit' mean it also sounds ill-natured in a way that emphatically does not suit Bob and his family.)
The abundance of works like this one, showing great positive change in difficult people, can also lead to frustration over the years, as one gradually discovers that, in the reality of adult life, people do not necessarily change and 'grow' as much as would be helpful - but that is hardly peculiar to A Christmas Carol.
However, in terms of evaluating A Christmas Carol by modern mores, I suppose one can't much fault Dickens on healthy eating! Often in the 19th century, meat and carbohydrates were valued over vegetables, which could be seen as a food for the poor. (No sprouts to spoil the Cratchits' dinner!) Yet a paragraph this ecstatic about veg and fruit (Dickens even sexualises it somewhat) could only fit these days into food or travel writing; anywhere else it would sound like a parodic escape from a public health campaign - normally it is cakes and chocolate that are extolled this way:
There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars; and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.
The notes in this edition seem very good. There is very little in the way of material so obvious it's patronising, and only a couple of things missed out which could have done with notes: " a twice-turned gown" and " like a bad lobster in a dark cellar" (in 2018 the combination of lobsters and basements made one think of Jordan Peterson fans; goodness knows what greater significance it had in 1843).
Something I keep mulling over more generally about Dickens is how he was, in his day, so effective in his social reform agenda, and so well-loved by readers, whereas fiction doing the same now - not least because he's done it before - easily comes across as either mawkish, or written by and for a particular small audience (which has in the past couple of years come to be called 'liberal elites'). As far as I can work out, reasons for this on a larger scale would have included the reform-mindedness of some 19th century parliaments, the prevalence of some strands of Christianity, and the abundance of cheap energy fuelled industrialisation which required better education and thereby societal participation of workers. Whereas nowadays many people are aggrieved about declining standards of living, making them feel, en masse, less inclined to share, and the economic underpinnings have a different trajectory. (Not that Dickens didn't have opponents, of course. The introduction mentions that the Westminster Review condemned him, in June 1844, for his ignorance of political economy and the ‘laws’ of supply and demand: ‘Who went without turkey and punch in order that Bob Cratchit might get them – for, unless there were turkeys and punch in surplus, some one must go without – is a disagreeable reflection kept wholly out of sight [by Dickens].’ But this was a predictable reaction from Utilitarian extremists. ('Utilitarian extremists' seems somehow an absurd phrase now, if utilitarianism is an abstract idea from introductory philosophy courses, but evidently they were a thing!) Yet although the sight of the poor was surely more familiar to the wealthy of the 18th and 19th century than to their 21st century contemporaries in many western cities, people were shocked by reports on working and living conditions - Earlier in the year [1843] he, like Elizabeth Barrett and many others, had been appalled by the brutal revelations of the Second Report (Trades and Manufactures) of the Children’s Employment Commission set up by Parliament.. Were many shocked this way, or were plenty of others inured? There was evidently some shift of ideas and sentiment which I've not really read about, and of which Dickens was no doubt part - it was not just underlying economic factors, even if they are the growth medium - which made those with power gradually start caring more and doing more. The biggest change was the post-WWII welfare state, but there was a broad trajectory of improvement over the century or so before that. Something I'd like to read more about.
----
What Christmas is as We Grow Older is a short piece Dickens wrote in 1851 at the age of 39. The introduction explains the background: for some years Dickens had been struggling with memories of family members and friends who had died, and he had started to find Christmas increasingly sad because of this. This article is a kind of resolution in which he concludes that it is fine and right to think of them as well as of those present, and to remember youthful ambitions unfulfilled as well as enjoying what is happening now. (Although probably the latter had been easier for him, as a successful man.) It mirrors the integration he'd written about Scrooge experiencing, but after he'd had more struggles of his own that marred his wish to find Christmas special. It shows how much death it was normal for someone of that age to have experienced at that age in the Victorian era (very different from now, though I thought of one good friend who, quite recently, at the same age, lost a much-loved parent), and that regardless of its being a universal experience then, and despite Dickens' religious belief, it was still a struggle. I'm sure this is the sort of writing that makes some people scoff at Dickens' sentimentality (the bit about child angels especially); and I couldn't help but speculate that it might have annoyed people who knew the less pleasant sides of Dickens' character - yet overall I found the piece incredibly moving; it instilled a sense of reverence, and before the end I cried in a way few books have ever provoked (not just welling up a bit, the actually-need-a-handkerchief sort) and couldn't read anything else straight afterwards.
(Read Dec 2018 - Jan 2019; reviewed January 2019. The review on Goodreads.)
23 November 2018
The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction by Ashley Jackson
[3.5] If you are actively interested in the British Empire and current historical approaches to it, this is as good a place as any to start, and it contains a lot of useful information. But if you aren't especially keen on the topic in the first place, the broad, generalised overview of events in the central chapters, with too few specific examples and anecdotes, seems unlikely to spark overwhelming enthusiasm. For something more lively also involving British historians, you could listen to the several In Our Time episodes about empire and its legacy.
I read this book in two halves, more than six months apart. During the first half, it was serving as my introduction to some aspects of the topic; when I read the rest of it today (including restarting chapter 4), there was very little which I hadn't heard before. It is not one of those VSI books that takes an interestingly unconventional approach, and that still has plenty to offer the non-beginner, but it is a useful refresher due to its fairly comprehensive coverage. Nor does it neglect the cultural aspects of imperialism, whether in Britain or its effects on people in colonised areas, for example quoting Nelson Mandela: "The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, and British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture."
The coverage of concepts of empire, both the British Empire and empires in general, in the early chapters, is useful, and introduces ideas that readers new to the subject probably won't have picked up elsewhere, such as classifications of different types of dominions, and the range and percentage of global natural resources in the pre-WWII empire, things more systematically understandable in writing than in a documentary voiceover,
During the 'Rise and Fall' chapter (4), the potted history of events, I craved interesting details, and in their absence found myself understanding why, when I was younger, I considered most history between 1603-1945 (with the possible exception of the English Civil War) to be dull, and ignored it when I could. The chapter's most interesting points were IMO: starting British Imperial history with English medieval incursions to Wales and Ireland; the reminder that Pax Britannica meant peace between the great powers (it's always said these days anyway that it was obviously not peace for those living in colonised areas); the Crimean War as an imperial war, trying to stop Russia gaining a foothold in the Mediterranean, and part of the fighting over the lands of the declining Ottoman Empire (because of Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War has remained famous in Britain among those who were not taught imperial history at school in the 1980s and 90s, with its wider context often unclear - and 19th century Russia is too little thought of as an imperial power because its conquests were contiguous); and the post-WWII idea of Portugal as a particularly backward colonial power, meaning that not being like the Portuguese government was among Britain's many motivations for withdrawing from its colonies in such a hurry in the late 1940s, 50s and 1960s.
I enjoyed the historiography chapter a lot more, because, well, historiography. And also more detail. (Beginners without an academic history background may be less keen of course.) It barely touches on the work of some major historians, but in a general introduction for the public and other beginners, it probably is fair to mention the likes of Niall Ferguson and Linda Colley several times, as they feature in the British media more often than many academic big names - although so does Catherine Hall, who only gets one mention. It could say more about history written outside the UK, although as this book was published in 2013, it pre-dates the splash made by Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire.
The final chapter addresses a thorny question which, as Jackson says, many academics would rather ignore, but one which does interest the public: was the legacy of empire good or bad overall? It's an accomplished piece of writing, addressing many aspects on either side, essentially finding them indivisible, but leaning mildly towards an assertion that the bad aspects should not be forgotten. It's a position which is less radical than plenty of contemporary historians, but which might also be considered too radical and overly PC by staunch fans of Niall Ferguson and other conservatives. It is predicated on norms such as global trade and technological developments being broadly good for humanity - so anti-capitalists may find some aspects do not meet their expectations - and it does not explore the environmental impact of empire on non-human nature (by no means a settled question; for instance Amitav Ghosh suggested in The Great Derangement that it may have even slowed environmental damage and pollution by restricting the development of industry on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century). It shows how the international world system still uses many concepts originating in 18th-19th century European empires, and very briefly touches on the pervasiveness of the imperial legacy via the popularity of sugar, cotton and chocolate, the question of whether empires may be better for religious freedom and some minorities than nation states (c.f. Romans, Ottomans) and the new colonialism of China via soft power and the purchase of land in Africa and other locations - interesting subjects covered in more depth in other publications. However, its pitch, and its determination to show both sides of the argument seems ideal for a varied general audience, which of course will not only be white British readers and conservative anglophiles, but people with ancestry from colonised areas, and a global readership including countries such as India.
(finished Nov 2018, reviewed Nov 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
I read this book in two halves, more than six months apart. During the first half, it was serving as my introduction to some aspects of the topic; when I read the rest of it today (including restarting chapter 4), there was very little which I hadn't heard before. It is not one of those VSI books that takes an interestingly unconventional approach, and that still has plenty to offer the non-beginner, but it is a useful refresher due to its fairly comprehensive coverage. Nor does it neglect the cultural aspects of imperialism, whether in Britain or its effects on people in colonised areas, for example quoting Nelson Mandela: "The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, and British institutions were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture."
The coverage of concepts of empire, both the British Empire and empires in general, in the early chapters, is useful, and introduces ideas that readers new to the subject probably won't have picked up elsewhere, such as classifications of different types of dominions, and the range and percentage of global natural resources in the pre-WWII empire, things more systematically understandable in writing than in a documentary voiceover,
During the 'Rise and Fall' chapter (4), the potted history of events, I craved interesting details, and in their absence found myself understanding why, when I was younger, I considered most history between 1603-1945 (with the possible exception of the English Civil War) to be dull, and ignored it when I could. The chapter's most interesting points were IMO: starting British Imperial history with English medieval incursions to Wales and Ireland; the reminder that Pax Britannica meant peace between the great powers (it's always said these days anyway that it was obviously not peace for those living in colonised areas); the Crimean War as an imperial war, trying to stop Russia gaining a foothold in the Mediterranean, and part of the fighting over the lands of the declining Ottoman Empire (because of Florence Nightingale, the Crimean War has remained famous in Britain among those who were not taught imperial history at school in the 1980s and 90s, with its wider context often unclear - and 19th century Russia is too little thought of as an imperial power because its conquests were contiguous); and the post-WWII idea of Portugal as a particularly backward colonial power, meaning that not being like the Portuguese government was among Britain's many motivations for withdrawing from its colonies in such a hurry in the late 1940s, 50s and 1960s.
I enjoyed the historiography chapter a lot more, because, well, historiography. And also more detail. (Beginners without an academic history background may be less keen of course.) It barely touches on the work of some major historians, but in a general introduction for the public and other beginners, it probably is fair to mention the likes of Niall Ferguson and Linda Colley several times, as they feature in the British media more often than many academic big names - although so does Catherine Hall, who only gets one mention. It could say more about history written outside the UK, although as this book was published in 2013, it pre-dates the splash made by Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire.
The final chapter addresses a thorny question which, as Jackson says, many academics would rather ignore, but one which does interest the public: was the legacy of empire good or bad overall? It's an accomplished piece of writing, addressing many aspects on either side, essentially finding them indivisible, but leaning mildly towards an assertion that the bad aspects should not be forgotten. It's a position which is less radical than plenty of contemporary historians, but which might also be considered too radical and overly PC by staunch fans of Niall Ferguson and other conservatives. It is predicated on norms such as global trade and technological developments being broadly good for humanity - so anti-capitalists may find some aspects do not meet their expectations - and it does not explore the environmental impact of empire on non-human nature (by no means a settled question; for instance Amitav Ghosh suggested in The Great Derangement that it may have even slowed environmental damage and pollution by restricting the development of industry on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th century). It shows how the international world system still uses many concepts originating in 18th-19th century European empires, and very briefly touches on the pervasiveness of the imperial legacy via the popularity of sugar, cotton and chocolate, the question of whether empires may be better for religious freedom and some minorities than nation states (c.f. Romans, Ottomans) and the new colonialism of China via soft power and the purchase of land in Africa and other locations - interesting subjects covered in more depth in other publications. However, its pitch, and its determination to show both sides of the argument seems ideal for a varied general audience, which of course will not only be white British readers and conservative anglophiles, but people with ancestry from colonised areas, and a global readership including countries such as India.
(finished Nov 2018, reviewed Nov 2018. The review on Goodreads.)
10 September 2018
Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania by Adam Mickiewicz, tr. Bill Johnston
The new translation published in 2018 by Archipelago Books. I received a free Advance Review Copy ebook via Edelweiss.
Pan Tadeusz is the Polish classic, the ‘national epic’. In English, there isn’t a sole work with comparable stature and ubiquity.
Given my heritage, the way I'd felt about not having read Pan Tadeusz was much as if I hadn't read - or even really known the stories of - Pride and Prejudice, or Jane Eyre, or Oliver Twist as soon as I could.
But I’m also particular about translations: I didn’t want to read Tadeusz in an old translation with poor style. It was easy not even to try, given the disgraceful lack of Polish classics in UK bookshops and from major British publishers. Pre-internet, I didn’t even know of English translations, and I’ve certainly never seen one to browse in a shop or library, whereas I stumbled on the Oxford edition of the Finnish national epic The Kalevala in a bookshop round about 2002. The sing-song style of Kenneth Mackenzie’s 1964 translation - Amazon preview here, if you scroll past the introduction – was one I knew I could not enjoy, nevermind love, or recommend without apology. Long sequences of obvious line-end rhymes don’t sound good in contemporary English - worse than in some other languages. Mickiewicz’s hero and near-contemporary Byron may have used them in English, but a) twentieth-century translators aren’t Byron and b) I don’t really like the sound of them in Byron anyway.
The lack of a great new translation of Pan Tadeusz in the late 00s - 2010s had puzzled me, given the current enthusiasm for translated books in the English-speaking literary world, and the visibility of Poles in Britain (by the biggest foreign-born minority, and for some years before that, the second). It had been so long that I’d become resigned to never reading it my whole life, and just watching the Andrzej Wajda film instead. (I watched a few of his in the spring but - now, it seems, luckily - hadn’t got round to his Pan Tadeusz.)
So I don’t think I’ve ever been as delighted to see a book appear in my Goodreads feed as I was to sight this, Bill Johnston’s new translation of Pan Tadeusz, just over a week ago. Bill Johnston, who translated my favourite contemporary Polish book, Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk, a thing of intoxicating atmosphere and exquisite descriptions. Thank you very much to Goodreads friend Lee Klein for posting about the advance review copy he’d received from Archipelago, and thereby alerting me to this translation's existence. I went straight over to Edelweiss, which I hadn’t been on for about 18 months, and was able to get an e-ARC there. Reading it has been accompanied by strange synergies: learning of a direct ancestor named Tadeusz whose lifetime overlapped the fictional one, and this morning finding the Windows Spotlight random lockscreen picture was of another, entirely different, ancestral area.
Once or twice, as I started the book, I felt foolish for not having read an earlier translation cover to cover, that I wouldn’t be writing a full-scale comparison in a review. But a quick look back at the beginning of the Mackenzie, and the Project-Gutenberg-age Noyes prose translation, made me glad - as first impressions have a stronger effect on me than they ought - that I was reading it for the first time in a version which I could love in the way that I love a few great English classics.
This is a seriously impressive feat of translation. (Johnston’s webpage indicates he’s been working on it since 2013.) I think I’ve only read two other volumes of translated poetry I found as good in themselves, Edna St Vincent Millay’s version of Baudelaire (in a class apart, and a reworking as much as a translation) and the [book:New Collected Poems|305941] of Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton. I also loved Keith Bosley’s translation of the Kalevala – which I now hanker to re-read – but much of that was for the story and atmosphere, and I more often wondered how lines would have sounded in the original, than marvelled at the construction in English.
Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in a characteristic Polish meter, thirteen-syllable alexandrines. Johnston has transposed it into the classic English iambic pentameter, and made wonderful use of enjambment, half-rhymes and similar devices that feel like real poetry which has stood the test of time and sound right to the contemporary reader. (The meter also augmented the quality of the multiple-wedding ending, by association with Shakespearean comedy.) The rhyming couplets do not weigh down the ends of lines as they would from a lesser pen. Johnston states in his introduction that this is also a line-by-line translation. As someone who has never been able to write so much as a decent limerick, I find that phenomenal. There is the occasional line or word that doesn’t quite work on more than a scansion level, but in such a long poem, that is only to be expected, and the great stuff by far outweighs the misfires.
I didn’t realise how little I knew (or maybe how much I’d forgotten) about Pan Tadeusz before I read it. Tadeusz himself is only nineteen. (He first appears in a wonderful scene of returning home after finishing university, one which in some respects could only have occurred so far in the past, and in a large country - he didn’t visit during his studies, nor hear much news from relatives - but which is also beautifully familiar in its evocation of how a place once known has changed, and seeing one’s old room repurposed.) He is present in many scenes, but is by no means at the centre of all the action - I can see why the poem has an alternative subtitle. It is contemporaneous with parts of War and Peace, and is another of the 19th century great works springing from the Napoleonic Wars – and of course the ominous Great Comet of 1811 is sighted:
Then hauling them north, toward the polar star.
All Lithuania, filled with dread untold,
Nightly would watch this spectacle unfold—
An evil sign, with other auguries:
Birds of ill omen gave portentous cries
And gathered in empty fields, bills sharpened, massed
As though expecting corpses for a feast.
Dogs, rooting obstinately in the earth,
Howled and howled shrilly, as if smelling death—
Betokening war or famine; foresters
Saw the Plague Maiden in the graveyard firs,
Head higher yet than where the treetops stand,
A bloodied scarf aflap in her left hand.
The portent is left hanging in the air, because, as Johnston explains in the introduction, the text largely conveys a sense of hope, by ending before battle, when the Napoleonic army might still help Poland-Lithuania free itself from the Russians. Even snapshots of historical defeat can sound victorious to the uninitiated:
Next comes Jasiński, handsome, young, unbending,
Alongside Korsak, his bosom companion, standing
On Praga’s ramparts on heaped Russian dead,
Hacking down more as Praga blazes red.
Old Maciej, one of my favourite characters, is more circumspect about the forthcoming battle, but is finally shifted aside for this opinion. Emotionally, the story’s ending feels happy, even if you know it’s not actually going to be later. It’s evident why Pan Tadeusz endured, and sustained Poles through partition and the Soviet bloc years.
A lot of the poem is made up of two types of scene. There's pastoral description, which I love - I’m one of the few people who would have liked Anna Karenina better if there were more of it – but the sheer quantity of scenery probably has a lot to do with the low rating of the book by Poles, for whom it is a permanent, national fixture on their equivalent of the A-level syllabus. And secondly, large-scale, largely drunken fighting. Most of the conflict is related in a detailed and exciting way which worked brilliantly for me as a fan of action films. I liked hearing about the characters (lots of the ‘retired badass’ trope, a favourite of mine) and their histories and weapons, and there was just the right number of them – enough to give a feeling of scale, but not so many it was confusing or that they were reduced to the sort of brief mentions that, IMO, made parts of the Iliad little more than a casualty list. A ‘foray’ here is a kind of armed raid by neighbours that took place to enforce a court decision in an area without police, and there seems to have been something of a raiding culture – although not as lawless as the Scots/English Border Reivers – which had declined through the later 18th century and which by the time Pan Tadeusz is set, had pretty much disappeared under Russian rule.
For those who love to absorb social history through fiction and poetry, especially this kind of rural setting found in Tolstoy, and as Johnston points out, Thomas Hardy (now I want to read more Hardy!), Pan Tadeusz is a feast. And boy are there feasts in this book...
Some readers may wish to be forewarned that there are hunting scenes; these occur in much the same way you’d find in Tolstoy, couched in descriptions of nature and landscape. The age of one of the female love interests may bother some English-speaking readers, although from the perspective of historical understanding, I found the way she was presented interesting. When Zosia first appeared, I read her as 16, 17 or 18 (and with her peasanty clothes and habit of using windows as doors, I imagined her looking like a slightly younger version of Malina in Wajda’s Brzezina). Throughout the story - if it hadn’t been for the one scene in which Zosia’s aunt mentions that she is 13 and now of age - I would have assumed that she was in her mid to late teens. She simply seems to be regarded by society in a way that, in an English novel of the same period, reflected a girl a few years older. (I have seen a few genealogical records of 15 year olds married in late 18th-19th century Poland, and this was a region in which the West European Marriage Pattern did not apply.)
The aunt, Telimena (probably in her 30s) may not always be so flatteringly portrayed later in the poem as she is at first, but what stuck with me most strongly was the first scene in which she appears:
So she asked about new books, and how he rated
Their authors (she spoke in French), while his replies
Led to more questions touching on his views.
And then—well, then she turned to music, dance,
Art, sculpture too. Her knowledge was immense,
Whether of canvas, score, or printed word.
Her learning left Tadeusz stunned, and scared
That he’d end up exposed to ridicule;
He stammered like a pupil quizzed in school.
This is a work that has a place for an intelligent woman, in a way that by no means all 19th century literature does, even if, it’s later indicated, she might be a bit too much of a pretentious hipster and too modern.She doesn’t meet a bad end, either, it’s a pragmatic one, even if she doesn’t remain on a pedestal.
I’m pretty sure no-one had ever told me before that Pan Tadeusz is humorous. It gives it whole layers of enjoyment I never expected. (What did I used to think it was? Probably something about a 60-year old man reminiscing about his life and travels.) This is the Romantic movement partly being itself, and partly laughing at itself. Perfect for my sensibilities. It’s epic poetry… but it also mentions things like swatting flies while preparing to cook; the epic form is sometimes mocked, sometimes used in earnest. It struck me that another classic Polish poet, Juliusz Słowacki, criticised it as 'piggish' for its low rural comedy and domesticity - this is the stuff for which I like it so much. Even calling it Pan Tadeusz after a character who isn't the centre of the action and who is neither hugely heroic nor anti-heroic, seems part of the semi-satire. Older characters and customs reflect Sarmatianism, essentially an earlier, institutionalised form of Romanticism particular to Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and some neighbouring countries. The foray happens basically because a young nobleman who’s been on the Grand Tour thinks ancient family feuds are really cool.
Pan Tadeusz was written in Polish, is seen as a Polish work, and several characters are described as ‘good Poles’ – but the action takes place in what is now Belarus, where Mickiewicz was born, and the narrative frequently hails Lithuania. This is the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the greatest powers of early modern Europe (Russia’s incipient colonial expansion had not yet made it the looming great bear) but barely known to many Westerners who don’t read East European history or play historical strategy games. As Johnston relates in his introduction, its apparently progressive system of elected monarchs also led to its weakening and demise, and to the partition of Poland among neighbouring powers in the late 18th century. Pan Tadeusz is the story of Polish-speaking gentry, szlachta (some Polish by ancestry, some Lithuanian, many mixed) and their rivalry with local aristocrats – the former had some differences of status from English gentry – but it doesn’t relate what local Lithuanian-speaking peasantry (serfs) thought of all this. This mélange of nationalities spilling across borders doesn’t, again, have direct equivalents in the contemporary English speaking West, and it reflects the multicultural pre-Second World War Central and Eastern Europe, before many of those identifying as Poles, Germans etc were resettled within the current borders of those countries, and of course before the Jewish communities were destroyed. (Through the whole poem, there are 3 or 4 lines that read as antisemitic or negative stereotypes of Jews – in 2018, the notes’ description of the blood libel as a canard doesn’t look a strong enough word ... even 3 years ago these things seemed more of the past. But there are a lot more lines representing Jewishness positively, via the innkeeper Jankiel, who is shown as very popular and an all-round top bloke.)
Pan Tadeusz is a text haunted by a future its author could never have known. Look up character surnames online and there are famous people born long after Mickiewicz died, who must spring to mind for many modern Polish readers. Look up place names online and it’s massacre after hideous massacre, the repetition reinforcing horrific statistic that over 95% of Jews in Lithuania were killed, by Nazis and locals from 1941-44, to the point that I started wondering how on earth anyone descended from Lithuanian Jews made it – although of course, like Bob Dylan’s grandparents, most of their forebears would have left quite some time earlier.
This edition has good notes which stick to the directly relevant 18th-19th century history – Mickiewicz’s original notes, which he wrote because he was writing about an area and mostly-vanished customs unfamiliar even to many Polish readers of the 1830s, and more by Bill Johnston. (Johnston’s introduction is also great for historical context. One small point I’d like to respond to: he says that the only gratuitous glorification of anything Polish is of coffee; I think I noticed one more: frogs.)
It was because I was reading on desktop that I looked so much on Wikpedia and elsewhere, and took so long to read the book. (It is quite a short text, with a Kindle count of 3600.) I don’t mind the layout issues of PDF ARCs converted to Kindle when a book is in prose, but for poetry, I want to read the words on the right lines. Reading on desktop did mean, though, that I got a fuller cultural picture of references in the book when I looked things up online – which is what I wanted for such a momentous read in personal terms. It was also interesting to follow tangents such as photos of ethnographic folk museums, the disagreements between the pre-war Litvak and Galician Jewish communities and the Gefilte fish line, and the mostly-complimentary Chicago Polish stereotype, Grabowski and associated, less flattering, comedy sketches. If you don’t feel compelled to read all the history you will be fine with the endnotes in the book – only snag is they are not linked in the text, at least in the e-ARC.
If you are going to read Pan Tadeusz in English, you should read this translation, which deserves to become the definitive modern one. If you’ve read it previously in another version and didn’t like it much, but the work is important to you, re-read it in this one. I hope Johnston’s version ends up as a Penguin or Oxford Classic, because it bloody well should - though one of them bloody well should have done Pan Tadeusz a long time ago. (Random House’s buying up of Knausgård from Archipelago leads me to hope that this edition might get the distribution it deserves by a similar route.)
Sometimes it seems a shame that the best-known translation prizes, like the Booker International and the BTBA don’t accept re-translations. It's obvious why they don't, as a rule: a Pevear & Volokhonsky rendition of a popular Russian novel that’s already been translated fifteen times doesn’t need the publicity, but lesser-known classics may – and when a translation of one of those is superlatively good, as this one is, it deserves acclaim and attention.
This is a bit like when I finished War and Peace, except that then, there had been longer to get used to it: I still can’t quite believe I’ve actually read Pan Tadeusz. And I really can't believe that it was this enjoyable.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
Pan Tadeusz is the Polish classic, the ‘national epic’. In English, there isn’t a sole work with comparable stature and ubiquity.
Given my heritage, the way I'd felt about not having read Pan Tadeusz was much as if I hadn't read - or even really known the stories of - Pride and Prejudice, or Jane Eyre, or Oliver Twist as soon as I could.
But I’m also particular about translations: I didn’t want to read Tadeusz in an old translation with poor style. It was easy not even to try, given the disgraceful lack of Polish classics in UK bookshops and from major British publishers. Pre-internet, I didn’t even know of English translations, and I’ve certainly never seen one to browse in a shop or library, whereas I stumbled on the Oxford edition of the Finnish national epic The Kalevala in a bookshop round about 2002. The sing-song style of Kenneth Mackenzie’s 1964 translation - Amazon preview here, if you scroll past the introduction – was one I knew I could not enjoy, nevermind love, or recommend without apology. Long sequences of obvious line-end rhymes don’t sound good in contemporary English - worse than in some other languages. Mickiewicz’s hero and near-contemporary Byron may have used them in English, but a) twentieth-century translators aren’t Byron and b) I don’t really like the sound of them in Byron anyway.
The lack of a great new translation of Pan Tadeusz in the late 00s - 2010s had puzzled me, given the current enthusiasm for translated books in the English-speaking literary world, and the visibility of Poles in Britain (by the biggest foreign-born minority, and for some years before that, the second). It had been so long that I’d become resigned to never reading it my whole life, and just watching the Andrzej Wajda film instead. (I watched a few of his in the spring but - now, it seems, luckily - hadn’t got round to his Pan Tadeusz.)
So I don’t think I’ve ever been as delighted to see a book appear in my Goodreads feed as I was to sight this, Bill Johnston’s new translation of Pan Tadeusz, just over a week ago. Bill Johnston, who translated my favourite contemporary Polish book, Dukla by Andrzej Stasiuk, a thing of intoxicating atmosphere and exquisite descriptions. Thank you very much to Goodreads friend Lee Klein for posting about the advance review copy he’d received from Archipelago, and thereby alerting me to this translation's existence. I went straight over to Edelweiss, which I hadn’t been on for about 18 months, and was able to get an e-ARC there. Reading it has been accompanied by strange synergies: learning of a direct ancestor named Tadeusz whose lifetime overlapped the fictional one, and this morning finding the Windows Spotlight random lockscreen picture was of another, entirely different, ancestral area.
Once or twice, as I started the book, I felt foolish for not having read an earlier translation cover to cover, that I wouldn’t be writing a full-scale comparison in a review. But a quick look back at the beginning of the Mackenzie, and the Project-Gutenberg-age Noyes prose translation, made me glad - as first impressions have a stronger effect on me than they ought - that I was reading it for the first time in a version which I could love in the way that I love a few great English classics.
This is a seriously impressive feat of translation. (Johnston’s webpage indicates he’s been working on it since 2013.) I think I’ve only read two other volumes of translated poetry I found as good in themselves, Edna St Vincent Millay’s version of Baudelaire (in a class apart, and a reworking as much as a translation) and the [book:New Collected Poems|305941] of Tomas Transtromer, translated by Robin Fulton. I also loved Keith Bosley’s translation of the Kalevala – which I now hanker to re-read – but much of that was for the story and atmosphere, and I more often wondered how lines would have sounded in the original, than marvelled at the construction in English.
Mickiewicz wrote Pan Tadeusz in a characteristic Polish meter, thirteen-syllable alexandrines. Johnston has transposed it into the classic English iambic pentameter, and made wonderful use of enjambment, half-rhymes and similar devices that feel like real poetry which has stood the test of time and sound right to the contemporary reader. (The meter also augmented the quality of the multiple-wedding ending, by association with Shakespearean comedy.) The rhyming couplets do not weigh down the ends of lines as they would from a lesser pen. Johnston states in his introduction that this is also a line-by-line translation. As someone who has never been able to write so much as a decent limerick, I find that phenomenal. There is the occasional line or word that doesn’t quite work on more than a scansion level, but in such a long poem, that is only to be expected, and the great stuff by far outweighs the misfires.
I didn’t realise how little I knew (or maybe how much I’d forgotten) about Pan Tadeusz before I read it. Tadeusz himself is only nineteen. (He first appears in a wonderful scene of returning home after finishing university, one which in some respects could only have occurred so far in the past, and in a large country - he didn’t visit during his studies, nor hear much news from relatives - but which is also beautifully familiar in its evocation of how a place once known has changed, and seeing one’s old room repurposed.) He is present in many scenes, but is by no means at the centre of all the action - I can see why the poem has an alternative subtitle. It is contemporaneous with parts of War and Peace, and is another of the 19th century great works springing from the Napoleonic Wars – and of course the ominous Great Comet of 1811 is sighted:
Then hauling them north, toward the polar star.
All Lithuania, filled with dread untold,
Nightly would watch this spectacle unfold—
An evil sign, with other auguries:
Birds of ill omen gave portentous cries
And gathered in empty fields, bills sharpened, massed
As though expecting corpses for a feast.
Dogs, rooting obstinately in the earth,
Howled and howled shrilly, as if smelling death—
Betokening war or famine; foresters
Saw the Plague Maiden in the graveyard firs,
Head higher yet than where the treetops stand,
A bloodied scarf aflap in her left hand.
The portent is left hanging in the air, because, as Johnston explains in the introduction, the text largely conveys a sense of hope, by ending before battle, when the Napoleonic army might still help Poland-Lithuania free itself from the Russians. Even snapshots of historical defeat can sound victorious to the uninitiated:
Next comes Jasiński, handsome, young, unbending,
Alongside Korsak, his bosom companion, standing
On Praga’s ramparts on heaped Russian dead,
Hacking down more as Praga blazes red.
Old Maciej, one of my favourite characters, is more circumspect about the forthcoming battle, but is finally shifted aside for this opinion. Emotionally, the story’s ending feels happy, even if you know it’s not actually going to be later. It’s evident why Pan Tadeusz endured, and sustained Poles through partition and the Soviet bloc years.
A lot of the poem is made up of two types of scene. There's pastoral description, which I love - I’m one of the few people who would have liked Anna Karenina better if there were more of it – but the sheer quantity of scenery probably has a lot to do with the low rating of the book by Poles, for whom it is a permanent, national fixture on their equivalent of the A-level syllabus. And secondly, large-scale, largely drunken fighting. Most of the conflict is related in a detailed and exciting way which worked brilliantly for me as a fan of action films. I liked hearing about the characters (lots of the ‘retired badass’ trope, a favourite of mine) and their histories and weapons, and there was just the right number of them – enough to give a feeling of scale, but not so many it was confusing or that they were reduced to the sort of brief mentions that, IMO, made parts of the Iliad little more than a casualty list. A ‘foray’ here is a kind of armed raid by neighbours that took place to enforce a court decision in an area without police, and there seems to have been something of a raiding culture – although not as lawless as the Scots/English Border Reivers – which had declined through the later 18th century and which by the time Pan Tadeusz is set, had pretty much disappeared under Russian rule.
For those who love to absorb social history through fiction and poetry, especially this kind of rural setting found in Tolstoy, and as Johnston points out, Thomas Hardy (now I want to read more Hardy!), Pan Tadeusz is a feast. And boy are there feasts in this book...
Some readers may wish to be forewarned that there are hunting scenes; these occur in much the same way you’d find in Tolstoy, couched in descriptions of nature and landscape. The age of one of the female love interests may bother some English-speaking readers, although from the perspective of historical understanding, I found the way she was presented interesting. When Zosia first appeared, I read her as 16, 17 or 18 (and with her peasanty clothes and habit of using windows as doors, I imagined her looking like a slightly younger version of Malina in Wajda’s Brzezina). Throughout the story - if it hadn’t been for the one scene in which Zosia’s aunt mentions that she is 13 and now of age - I would have assumed that she was in her mid to late teens. She simply seems to be regarded by society in a way that, in an English novel of the same period, reflected a girl a few years older. (I have seen a few genealogical records of 15 year olds married in late 18th-19th century Poland, and this was a region in which the West European Marriage Pattern did not apply.)
The aunt, Telimena (probably in her 30s) may not always be so flatteringly portrayed later in the poem as she is at first, but what stuck with me most strongly was the first scene in which she appears:
So she asked about new books, and how he rated
Their authors (she spoke in French), while his replies
Led to more questions touching on his views.
And then—well, then she turned to music, dance,
Art, sculpture too. Her knowledge was immense,
Whether of canvas, score, or printed word.
Her learning left Tadeusz stunned, and scared
That he’d end up exposed to ridicule;
He stammered like a pupil quizzed in school.
This is a work that has a place for an intelligent woman, in a way that by no means all 19th century literature does, even if, it’s later indicated, she might be a bit too much of a pretentious hipster and too modern.
I’m pretty sure no-one had ever told me before that Pan Tadeusz is humorous. It gives it whole layers of enjoyment I never expected. (What did I used to think it was? Probably something about a 60-year old man reminiscing about his life and travels.) This is the Romantic movement partly being itself, and partly laughing at itself. Perfect for my sensibilities. It’s epic poetry… but it also mentions things like swatting flies while preparing to cook; the epic form is sometimes mocked, sometimes used in earnest. It struck me that another classic Polish poet, Juliusz Słowacki, criticised it as 'piggish' for its low rural comedy and domesticity - this is the stuff for which I like it so much. Even calling it Pan Tadeusz after a character who isn't the centre of the action and who is neither hugely heroic nor anti-heroic, seems part of the semi-satire. Older characters and customs reflect Sarmatianism, essentially an earlier, institutionalised form of Romanticism particular to Poland-Lithuania, Hungary and some neighbouring countries. The foray happens basically because a young nobleman who’s been on the Grand Tour thinks ancient family feuds are really cool.
Pan Tadeusz was written in Polish, is seen as a Polish work, and several characters are described as ‘good Poles’ – but the action takes place in what is now Belarus, where Mickiewicz was born, and the narrative frequently hails Lithuania. This is the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the greatest powers of early modern Europe (Russia’s incipient colonial expansion had not yet made it the looming great bear) but barely known to many Westerners who don’t read East European history or play historical strategy games. As Johnston relates in his introduction, its apparently progressive system of elected monarchs also led to its weakening and demise, and to the partition of Poland among neighbouring powers in the late 18th century. Pan Tadeusz is the story of Polish-speaking gentry, szlachta (some Polish by ancestry, some Lithuanian, many mixed) and their rivalry with local aristocrats – the former had some differences of status from English gentry – but it doesn’t relate what local Lithuanian-speaking peasantry (serfs) thought of all this. This mélange of nationalities spilling across borders doesn’t, again, have direct equivalents in the contemporary English speaking West, and it reflects the multicultural pre-Second World War Central and Eastern Europe, before many of those identifying as Poles, Germans etc were resettled within the current borders of those countries, and of course before the Jewish communities were destroyed. (Through the whole poem, there are 3 or 4 lines that read as antisemitic or negative stereotypes of Jews – in 2018, the notes’ description of the blood libel as a canard doesn’t look a strong enough word ... even 3 years ago these things seemed more of the past. But there are a lot more lines representing Jewishness positively, via the innkeeper Jankiel, who is shown as very popular and an all-round top bloke.)
Pan Tadeusz is a text haunted by a future its author could never have known. Look up character surnames online and there are famous people born long after Mickiewicz died, who must spring to mind for many modern Polish readers. Look up place names online and it’s massacre after hideous massacre, the repetition reinforcing horrific statistic that over 95% of Jews in Lithuania were killed, by Nazis and locals from 1941-44, to the point that I started wondering how on earth anyone descended from Lithuanian Jews made it – although of course, like Bob Dylan’s grandparents, most of their forebears would have left quite some time earlier.
This edition has good notes which stick to the directly relevant 18th-19th century history – Mickiewicz’s original notes, which he wrote because he was writing about an area and mostly-vanished customs unfamiliar even to many Polish readers of the 1830s, and more by Bill Johnston. (Johnston’s introduction is also great for historical context. One small point I’d like to respond to: he says that the only gratuitous glorification of anything Polish is of coffee; I think I noticed one more: frogs.)
It was because I was reading on desktop that I looked so much on Wikpedia and elsewhere, and took so long to read the book. (It is quite a short text, with a Kindle count of 3600.) I don’t mind the layout issues of PDF ARCs converted to Kindle when a book is in prose, but for poetry, I want to read the words on the right lines. Reading on desktop did mean, though, that I got a fuller cultural picture of references in the book when I looked things up online – which is what I wanted for such a momentous read in personal terms. It was also interesting to follow tangents such as photos of ethnographic folk museums, the disagreements between the pre-war Litvak and Galician Jewish communities and the Gefilte fish line, and the mostly-complimentary Chicago Polish stereotype, Grabowski and associated, less flattering, comedy sketches. If you don’t feel compelled to read all the history you will be fine with the endnotes in the book – only snag is they are not linked in the text, at least in the e-ARC.
If you are going to read Pan Tadeusz in English, you should read this translation, which deserves to become the definitive modern one. If you’ve read it previously in another version and didn’t like it much, but the work is important to you, re-read it in this one. I hope Johnston’s version ends up as a Penguin or Oxford Classic, because it bloody well should - though one of them bloody well should have done Pan Tadeusz a long time ago. (Random House’s buying up of Knausgård from Archipelago leads me to hope that this edition might get the distribution it deserves by a similar route.)
Sometimes it seems a shame that the best-known translation prizes, like the Booker International and the BTBA don’t accept re-translations. It's obvious why they don't, as a rule: a Pevear & Volokhonsky rendition of a popular Russian novel that’s already been translated fifteen times doesn’t need the publicity, but lesser-known classics may – and when a translation of one of those is superlatively good, as this one is, it deserves acclaim and attention.
This is a bit like when I finished War and Peace, except that then, there had been longer to get used to it: I still can’t quite believe I’ve actually read Pan Tadeusz. And I really can't believe that it was this enjoyable.
(read and reviewed September 2018; the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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