Poland's Angry Romantic: Two Poems and a Play by Juliusz Słowacki (review)

For nearly twenty years, Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849), the titular Angry Romantic, led a largely one-sided war against Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland's greatest Romantic poet. One may say that their rivalry extended to the arena of Byronism. Although Polish Romantic poets as a group made a cottage industry of translating and imitating Byron's works, it was Mickiewicz's original verse that sparked a reaction akin to the Byron phenomenon. It was also Mickiewicz's brave if futile volte-face toward military insurrection in the 1850s that, to the Polish mind, most closely recalled the trajectory of Byron's life. Where, then, does this leave Slowacki? As Harold B. Segel notes in his introduction to Polish Romantic Drama (1977), no matter how high the younger poet's stock has risen since his death, he still 'plays Shelley to Mickiewicz's Byron' - a lofty, but secondary, position in the pantheon of European Romanticism.

Yet, as the selection of translations in Poland's Angry Romantic shows, one would be hard-pressed to find a sensibility more Byronic than Slowacki's. In the end, the moody Juliusz's insistence on the poet's creative autonomy and his contemptuous appraisal of his own homeland as the 'peacock and parrot of nations' rings a far more Byronic note than Mickiewicz's obsessive, messianic patriotism. Byron detested foreign despots, but loathed domestic cant with an equal passion. Furthermore, Beniowski (1840), Slowacki's virtuosic digressive poem in ottava rima, arguably stands as the closest relative to Childe Harold and Don Juan in any European literary tradition. Set very loosely against the background of the Confederation of Bar (1768-1776), the subject of one of the formative myths of Polish Romantic nationalism, and based even more loosely on the life of the legendary Bar Confederate, brigand, King of Madagascar and memoirist Maurycy August Beniowski (1746-1786), the poem - as this volume's introduction states - is 'a Polish Don Juan in truth [...], a perfect vehicle for meditation, humour, narrative, invective, description, and sentiment - for [Slowacki's] own swirling patterns of analytical thought and romantic imagining, of yearning and deflation'.

The scholarly introduction provides the reader with all he or she needs to know about the poem's setting, as well as the circumstances of its writing and initial reception. The scholar-translators survey the Confederacy's doomed history, the Three Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1772, 1793 and 1795), and the November Uprising of 1830-31. They also contextualise Slowacki's conflict with Mickiewicz over the poet's mission, the nature of patriotism and Poland's fate - a conflict that comes to a glorious, cosmic climax in Beniowski, as the poets 'part [...] not at last to shun, / But as two gods, each equal on his sun'. Above all, one must be grateful for Miroslawa Modrzewska and Peter Cochran's deft translation of the poem itself, which occupies nearly half of Poland's Angry Romantic.

Modrzewska and Cochran's work finally allows Anglophone readers to savour Slowacki's poetic mastery and cutting wit. It also affords non-Polonist scholars an opportunity to gauge the extent of Byron's influence on Slowacki and on Polish Romantics at large:

O melancholy! Nymph! Whence comest thou?    Art thou a creeping plague, an epidemic?From where didst thou originate, and how?    Both noblemen and poet academic Are touched by thee! - Ah, Nymph! I must avow    That I too caught the malady systemic,And am by now (the devil! - I'm no ironist)    No longer Polish - but a Byronist [...]

(I, 25)

This octave is rendered beautifully, but not without necessary compromises. The quest for an exact polysyllabic rhyme for 'Byronist' elicits an uninteresting and somewhat incongruously negated 'ironist', whereas the original's 'Bajronista' is pitted against the peppery exclamation 'niech cie porwie trzysta [let three...