Pan Tadeusz

by

Marcel Weyland

Pan Tadeusz is an epic poem by the Polish poet, writer and philosopher Adam Mickiewicz. The book was first published in June 1834 in Paris, and is considered by many to be the last great epic poem in European literature. Pan Tadeusz is recognized as the national epic of Poland. It is compulsory reading in Polish schools. A film based on the poem was made in 1999 by Andrzej Wajda. It is written in Polish alexandrines.

“While engaged in the political activity of the emigrés in Paris in the years 1832-34, Mickiewicz wrote the epic poem Pan Tadeusz, which remains the best-known and perhaps the greatest achievement of Polish poetry. It is a tale about nature and everyday life in the Lithuania of 1811-12, told with gentle humour. The author’s smiling benevolence changes the most trite details into fairyland charms. The classical training of the poet, his taste for the mock-heroic, and his fondness for Laurence Sterne when he was a student, find expression here in his descriptions of a reality distilled through nostalgia.” Czeslaw Milosz

About the Author

Marcel Weyland

Marcel Weyland escaped war-time Poland in 1940 and arrived in Australia as a war refugee in 1946. He is an architect with a law degree, and an interpreter and translator of Polish poetry, his previous translations being Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, Echoes – Poems of the Holocaust, The Word: 200 Years of Polish Poetry and Wladyslaw’s Szlengel’s What I Read to the Dead. Recently published is Love, Sex and Death, the poems of Boleslaw Lesmian, all published by Brandl & Schlesinger. He has lectured and given readings extensively in London, Poland, Lithuania, New Zealand and throughout Australia, and been invited to three successive International Congresses of Translators held in Krakow, Poland. He has been awarded the Order of Merit by the Polish Minister of Culture (2005), the medal of the Order of Australia (2008), the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit by the President of Poland (2012) and the Gold Cross Gloria Artis again by the Minister of Culture (2013).

In 1952 he married artist Phillipa Keane. They live in Sydney Australia and have 5 children, 21 gandchildren and 3 great grandchildren.