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.
