Ballads and Romances
Published on 1. May 2023
Book
Hardback
152 pages
978-1-80484-001-6 (ISBN)
Description
The year 2022 has been designated the Year of Romanticism in Poland.
An even two hundred years have passed since the first publication of Adam Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances - a collection of lyrics which has the same significance for Polish literature as Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads has for the English.
Poems of love, the supernatural, and the exotic, Mickiewicz's first volume of poetry achieved a level of sublimity that immediately set him at the head of all Polish writers - a position he sustained throughout his life with his lyrical, narrative, dramatic, and epic poetry, and which he continues to hold today. In cooperation with the Polish Cultural Institute of London, Glagoslav brings out an anniversary edition of Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances in the English translation of Charles S. Kraszewski.
The collection includes all the poems of the 1822 edition, plus the ballads added shortly before the poet's death to the 1852, Leipzig edition.
This publication is generously supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in London.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
381 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80484-001-6 (9781804840016)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is the national poet of Poland. He was successful in every genre at which he tried his 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 [Ballady i romanse, 1822], ushered in the Romantic Movement in Polish literature. His Erotic and Crimean Sonnets [Sonety mi¿osne and Sonety krymskie, 1826] form one of the most accomplished cycles in that demanding form since Petrarch. His narrative poems, Konrad Wallenrod (1828) and Gräyna (1823), reveal his sustained mastery with longer poetic genres. Mickiewicz's epic in twelve cantos, Pan Tadeusz (1834), is universally recognized as Poland's national epic, as well as the last Vergilian epic written in Europe.Prose occupies a rather minor niche in Mickiewcz's corpus of writings. The quasi-Biblical Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage [Ksi¿gi narodu i pielgrzymstwa polskiego, 1832] put the English reader in mind of a more practicable William Blake. With their socially and politically-applied Christianity, Mickiewicz had an appreciable influence on the thought of his friend, Lammenais. Finally, his Cours de litte¿rature slave professe¿ au Colle¿ge de France, delivered during his exile in Paris, and published posthumously in 1860, is one of the first balanced and comprehensive accounts of the Slavic traditions in literature and culture to meet Western eyes.It is impossible to assess the importance of Adam Mickiewicz to the Polish consciousness. During the period of the Partitions, which lasted from 1795 until 1918, Poles looked to Mickiewicz for the guidance that political figures could not supply them. He died in exile, trying to raise troops in Turkey for the Polish independence struggles.