Product: Pan Tadeusz (2000)
Rating: 5.0
A National Treasure.
"Pan Tadeusz" is a treasure of Polish literature, perhaps comparable in American culture to "Gone With The Wind" in literature, or "The Star Spangled Banner" in music. It was written around 1830 by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) who was what we would call their poet laureate, and was also a national hero, at a time when Poland (also called "Lithuania") was occupied by Russia. Poles had placed their hopes in vain in Napoleon to liberate their nation. Mickiewicz recognized the weakness of Poles to be their concern for personal affairs and an inability to work together for a larger cause. This theme is worked out in a conflict of two families over a piece of property, along with small land holders taking sides.What the casual English-speaker will not detect is that the Polish version is in rhyming verse (150 pages in the original). This is possible in Polish, perhaps more-so than any other language, in that Polish is not word-order-dependent. (Neither is Russian, but the latter prefers the most natural word order.) For the movie version, long discussions on art and nature have been edited out leaving the most relevant scenes, but still two and a half hours worth.The book is available in book stores, including a version with Polish and English text side-by-side. (You could do a lot worse than learning some Polish which 1930-60 was second language in the US.)An aside: take note of the oddly modern livery worn by servants on horseback accompanying their employer.