page_title: Jeremiah Curtin
section_title: Sienkiewicz
hierarchical_section_title: Jeremiah Curtin / Translations from Polish / Sienkiewicz
caption_attribution_description: Polish writer and Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916)
context_page_description: Jeremiah Curtin was an American ethnographer, folklorist, and translator. Curtin had an abiding interest in languages and was conversant with several. From 1883 to 1891 he was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology as a field researcher documenting the customs and mythologies of various Native American tribes.
  He and his wife, Alma Cardell Curtin, traveled extensively, collecting ethnological information, from the Modocs of the Pacific Northwest to the Buryats of Siberia.
  They made several trips to Ireland, visited the Aran Islands, and, with the aid of interpreters, collected folklore in southwest Munster and other Gaelic-speaking regions. Curtin compiled one of the first accurate collections of Irish folk material, and was an important source for W. B. Yeats. Curtin is known for several collections of Irish folktales.
  He also translated into English Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and other novels and stories by the Pole.
context_section_description: Curtin began translating Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novel With Fire and Sword in 1888 at age fifty.  Subsequently, he rendered the other two volumes of the author's Trilogy, other works by Sienkiewicz, and in 1897 his Quo Vadis, "[t]he handsome income ... from [whose] sale ... gave him ... financial independence ..." and set the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, on its feet. Sienkiewicz himself appears to have been short-changed in his part of the profits from the translation of the best-selling Quo Vadis.
  In 1897, Curtin's first meeting with Sienkiewicz, like his earlier first contact with the latter's writings, came about by sheer chance, in a hotel dining room at the Swiss resort of Ragatz.  For the next nine years, until Curtin's death in 1906, the two men would be in continual contact through correspondence and personal meetings.
  Harold B. Segel writes about Curtin's translations of works by Henryk Sienkiewicz:
  ... Curtin was an indefatigable, diligent, and reasonably accurate translator, but he lacked any real feeling for language.  Despite occasional lapses, the translations are acceptably faithful to the original, yet much of the time they are stilted and pedestrian.  This results, at times, as the American translator Nathan Haskell Dole had remarked [in 1895], from the location of the adverb in final position (even when this is not the Polish word order).... The "inelasticity" [that the Briton, Sir Edmund William Gosse spoke of [in 1897] is perhaps nowhere so clearly evident in Curtin's translations as in his insistence on rendering koniecznie as "absolutely" in all circumstances.
  The "odd foreign tone" mentioned by Dole can most often be attributed to Curtin's too literal translation and inept handling of idioms....
  
  The [London] Athenaeum review of [Sienkiewicz]'s Children of the Soil [i.e., Rodzina Połanieckich—The Połaniecki Family] in 1896 suggested, furthermore, that Curtin's use of "thou" and "thee" in the addresses of friends and relatives contributed to the stiffness of the translations.  Second person singular verbal and pronominal forms are, with rare exceptions, handled by Curtin in the archaic English fashion.  In Sienkiewicz's Trilogy, set in seventeenth-century Poland, or in Quo Vadis with its ancient Roman setting, this is less objectionable.  The translator has, by this means, attempted to introduce an appropriate antique flavor.  In Sienkiewicz's contemporary works, however, the results are less fortunate.
  Segel cites a series of mistranslations perpetrated by Curtin due to his carelessness, uncritical reliance on dictionaries, and ignorance of Polish idiom, culture, history and language.  Among the more striking is the rendering, in The Deluge, of "Czołem" ("Greetings!"—a greeting still used by Poles) "literally" as "With the forehead!"
  According to Segel, the greatest weakness of Curtin's translations is their literalness. "Despite the fact that the translator himself possessed no impressive literary talent, greater attention to matters of style would have eliminated many of the infelicities and made for less stilted translation. But Curtin worked hastily ... [C]ritics ... could only surmise that, in his fidelity to the letter of the original rather than to its spirit, Curtin presented a duller, less colorful Sienkiewicz".
  Contemporary critics were dismayed at Curtin's gratuitous, outlandish modifications of the spellings of Polish proper names and other terms, and at his failure to provide adequate annotations.
  Both Bozena Shallcross and Jan Rybicki say that, at least in the case of some early translations, that Curtin's work may have been based on Russian translations rather than the Polish originals.
  Sienkiewicz himself, who had spent time in America and knew the English language, wrote to the translator: "I have read with diligent attention all the volumes of my works sent me (American Edition).  I understand how great the difficulties were which you had to overcome, especially in translating the historical novels, the language of which is somewhat archaic in character.  I admire
caption: Henryk Sienkiewicz
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