Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania [Paperback]

The national epic of Poland and touchstone of modern European literature, now in a fresh translation by award-winning translator Bill Johnston.

A towering achievement in European literature, Pan Tadeusz is the central work of the Polish literary canon, heralded for its lovingly detailed recreation of a bygone world. The traditions of the Polish gentry and the social and natural landscape of the Lithuanian countryside are captured in verse of astounding beauty, simplicity, and power. Bill Johnston's translation of this seminal text allows English-language readers to experience the richness, humor, and narrative energy of the original.Winner of the 2019 ALTA National Translation Award in Poetry

Bill Johnston, celebrated as a translator of landmark Polish literature, has crafted a wondrously eloquent and entertaining new version of Pan Tadeusz. Over 450 never-flagging pages, he converts Mickiewicz’s 13-syllable rhyming lines into iambic couplets deployed with stupendous skill, grace and agility. Nimble half-rhymes, lithe enjambment and mischievous wordplay channel all the story’s humour and exuberance, and banish any risk of jingling monotony . . . At last, English readers can grasp why Pan Tadeusz belongs with Byron’s Don Juan and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in a glorious farewell trio that marked the swansong of the verse epic in Europe. — Boyd Tonkin, The Spectator

Like stumbling across a lost city, forgotten for ages and now brought back to life, in all its glittering, self-sufficient glory... Pan Tadeusz is that rarest of things, a revolutionarily conservative poem, lӁ