Ballads and Romances holds the same place in Polish literature that the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge hold in English: the book that began a national Romantic movement. First published in 1822, Adam Mickiewicz’s debut collection of poems of love, the supernatural and the folk imagination set him at the head of all Polish writers, a position he has never lost. Poland marked the collection’s bicentenary by declaring a Year of Romanticism in its honour.
This Glagoslav edition, published in cooperation with the Polish Cultural Institute in London, presents the complete collection in English translation by Charles S. Kraszewski: every poem of the 1822 edition, together with the ballads the poet added to the 1852 Leipzig edition shortly before his death. Ghosts and lake spirits, village lovers and midnight vows: these are poems in which folklore becomes literature.
Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) is the national poet of Poland, author of the epic Pan Tadeusz and the monumental drama Forefathers’ Eve, also available in English from Glagoslav. For readers of Polish literature in translation, and of European Romanticism at its source.
Author
Adam Mickiewicz
Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) is the national poet of Poland. He was successful in every genre that he took in hand, setting the benchmark for excellence in poetry, prose and drama, for all the writers that came after him. His lyric poems, collected in Ballads and Romances (1822), ushered in the Romantic Movement in Polish literature. His narrative poems, Grażyna (1823) and Konrad Wallenrod (1828), reveal his sustained mastery of longer poetic genres.
Mickiewicz’s epic in twelve books, Pan Tadeusz (1834), is universally recognised as Poland’s national epic, as well as the last Virgilian epic composed in Europe. Forefathers’ Eve (available in English translation from Glagoslav) is a four-part monumental drama that deals both with particular themes of Poland’s subjugation to the empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria, and general themes — the sense of love, both erotic and Platonic, time and eternity, fellowship and the Communion of the Saints.
Compared to the work of Dante and Goethe, it is this masterpiece of Polish monumental drama that elevates Mickiewicz to the ranks of what Eliot liked to call the ‘great Europeans.’ Among Mickiewicz’s prose works, his lectures at the Collège de France on Slavic Literature are noteworthy. Adam Mickiewicz died in southern Europe while attempting to recruit troops to fight against the Tsarist empire.
Translator
Charles S. Kraszewski (b. 1962) is a poet and translator, creative in both English and Polish. He is the author of three volumes of original verse in English (Diet of Nails; Beast; Chanameed), and one in Polish (Hallo, Sztokholm). He also authored a satirical novel Accomplices, You Ask? (San Francisco: Montag, 2021). He translates from Polish, Czech and Slovak into English, and from English and Spanish into Polish. He is a member of the Union of Polish Writers Abroad (London) and of the Association of Polish Writers (SPP, Kraków). In 2022 he was awarded the Gloria Artis medal (III Class) by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Poland.
