Adam Mickiewicz - Encounters with Polish Literature - S2E3

Adam Mickiewicz with Roman Koropeckyj (UCLA)

The Polish Sejm or parliament has declared 2022 The Year of Polish Romanticism, and this month we are looking at Poland’s greatest Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, the author of the national epic, Pan Tadeusz, the ever controversial drama The Forefathers’ Eve, and numerous collections of lyric poetry among other works.

We begin this episode by placing Polish Romanticism on the map of European Romanticism in the nineteenth century, considering commonly held philosophical concepts like Organicism and the Sublime, figures like the Byronic hero or the outsider, and looking at the way that Polish independence during the era of the partitions was a cause célèbre in Romantic literature and discourse across Europe.

In this episode we look at his early poem, “Romantyczność” (“The Romantic”) that could be consider a manifesto of Romanticism. We consider some aspects of his biography. We take a look at new translations of the Crimean Sonnetsby Kevin Kearney, and we read a few fragments of Bill Johnston’s recent translation of Pan Tadeusz. If you pay attention to the whole episode, you can see how the famous opening verse of Pan Tadeusz emerged from Rousseau’s treatise “On the Government of Poland.” We also discuss the uses of orientalism in Polish Romanticism. We look briefly at the controversy over a recent production of Forefathers’ Eve, part III, as a mirror to two images of Mickiewicz, as a great European intellectual and as the Polish national bard. For students interested in studying Polish at UCLA, Prof. Roman Koropeckyj gives a brief overview of the program.

Encounters with Polish Literature is a new video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb presents a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature.

Learn more about this episode, and see the biography of the guest on the Polish Cultural Institute New York's website. The linked page includes a bibliography of works in English by and about Adam Mickiewicz:
https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/202...

Access the Playlist of the entire series:
https://bit.ly/Encounters-ALL