Polish Romantic Drama: Plays in English Translation ed. by Harold B. Segel, and: Twentieth-Century Polish Avant-Garde Drama: Plays, Scenarios, Critical Documents ed. by Daniel Gerould (review)

Books in Review Polish Romantic Drama: Plays in English Translation. Selected and edited, with an Introduction, by Harold B. Segel. Cornell University Press, 320 pp., $17.50 (cloth). Twentieth-Century Polish Avant-Garde Drama: Plays, Scenarios, Critical Documents. Edited, with an Introduction, by Daniel Gerould. Cornell University Press, 287 pp., $15.00 (cloth). Martin Esslin We are living in a world of shrinking intellectual horizons. Only thirty or forty years ago it was hardly possible to claim to be an educated person , let alone a scholar, if one did not read Latin and Greek, French, Italian and German. Today, alas, even the knowledge of these basic languages of Western erudition has been greatly eroded. Even then, and, alas, how much more so today, therefore, the languages spoken by relatively fewer people (Scandinavian, Finnish, Hungarian, Czech) or by millions with less established cultural prestige (Polish, Russian, even Spanish) have moved further to the outer fringe of the awareness of even those who are supposed to be knowledgeable specialists in literature or drama. This puts an immense responsibility on that handful of schQlars who are capable of reading in, and translating, from those languages, all of which have literatures that do not need to shun comparison with those of the more favored tongues. Poland, a country with almost forty million inhabitants and a cultural heritage of truly outstanding quality, is at a particular disadvantage: a great power in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, its exposed and indefensible position between Russia and Germany led to its political obliteration, reconstitution and re-partition throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, finally, in our own century, to its occupation by Nazis and Russians and its present precarious situation as part of the Soviet Empire, subjected to varying periods of cultural repression and thaw. The Polish language is one of the most mellifluous and expressive instruments for poetry; and the intense emotional atmosphere of a nation constantly threatened by extinction has produced a truly im94 posing literary tradition. Poland lies at the crossroads of Europe, between East and West, Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy; it was the homeland of millions of Jews with their own magnificent and intense culture, and, while ruled over by Russians, Germans and Austrians, subjected to a multitude of potent cultural and artistic influences. No wonder, therefore, that the theatrical tradition in Poland is rich and of immense variety. Very little of this has penetrated into the consciousness of English-speaking theatre-lovers. The situation was slightly better in the German-speaking world. I still remember the excitement produced in me by seeing a performance, at the Vienna Burgtheater, when I was still a schoolboy in the nineteen thirties, of Zygmunt Krasinski 's Un-Divine Comedy in a translation and adaptation by the AustroPolish playwright Franz Theodor Csokor, with Werner Kraus, one of the greatest actors of this century, in the role of Count Henry. This performance left me in no doubt that I was in the presence of a work on a scale and on a level of excellence comparable to that of Goethe's Faust, an epic and prophetic poem in which a young man of twenty-one had, in 1833, foreseen the rise of Hitler and Stalin a hundred years later and brilliantly articulated the collision between an older, aristocratic order and the world of mass materialism in a final cataclysm (which at that time was only too clearly about to engulf us all-World War II). The Un-divine Comedy forms the centerpiece of Harold B. Segel's volume of Polish Romantic Drama. It is preceded by Adam Mickiewicz's Forefather's Eve and followed by Julius Slowacki's tragi-comedy Fantazy . Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski are the three great poets of the Romantic era, the era of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Goethe, Hugo, Musset and Manzoni. This is to say that their work is above all great poetry and depends on the impact of that poetry. In Segel's anthology much, therefore, depends on the quality of the translations. Here, alas, it must be said that the play by Poland's greatest poet, Mickiewicz, comes off worst. The translation of Forefather's Eve, which is said to be...