According to the
epitaph placed over Curtin's grave in
Bristol, Vermont, by his erstwhile employer, the
Smithsonian Institution, and written by his friend
Theodore Roosevelt, Polish was but one of seventy languages that "Jeremiah Curtin [in his] travel[s] over the wide world ... learn[ed] to speak". In addition to publishing collections of
fairy tales and
folklore and writings about his travels, Curtin translated a number of volumes by
Henryk Sienkiewicz, including his
Trilogy set in the 17th-century
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, a couple of volumes on contemporary Poland, and, most famously and profitably,
Quo Vadis (1897). In 1900 Curtin translated
The Teutonic Knights by Sienkiewicz, the author's major
historic novel about the
Battle of Grunwald and its background. He also published an English version of
Bolesław Prus' only
historical novel,
Pharaoh, under the title
The Pharaoh and the Priest (1902). Having both Polish and Russian interests, Curtin scrupulously avoided publicly favoring either people in their historic neighbors' quarrels (particularly since the
Russian Empire had been in occupation of a third of the former
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, including Warsaw, since the latter part of the 18th century).
Sienkiewicz , author of
Quo Vadis 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: 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, Curtin's work may have been based on Russian translations rather than on the Polish originals.
Prus In 1897, during a
Warsaw visit, Curtin learned from August Robert Wolff, of Gebethner and Wolff, Sienkiewicz's Polish publishers, that the Polish journalist and novelist
Bolesław Prus, an acquaintance of Sienkiewicz, was as good a writer, and that none of Sienkiewicz's works surpassed in quality Prus' novel
Pharaoh. Curtin read
Pharaoh, enjoyed it and decided to translate it in the future. During an 1898 Warsaw visit, Curtin began translating Prus'
Pharaoh. Polish friends had urged him to translate it, and he had himself found it "a powerful novel, well conceived and skillfully executed"; he declared its author a "deep and independent thinker." In September 1899, again in Warsaw—where, as often happened, Sienkiewicz was away—Curtin went ahead with his translation of Prus'
historical novel. Wolff urged him to continue with Prus, calling him profounder than Sienkiewicz. During another Warsaw visit, in early 1900, while again waiting for Sienkiewicz to return from abroad, Curtin called on Prus. Christopher Kasparek says that, if anything, Curtin did still worse by Sienkiewicz's "more profound" compatriot,
Bolesław Prus. Prus'
historical novel Pharaoh appears, in Curtin's version, as
The Pharaoh and the Priest by "Alexander Glovatski." Why the author's
pen name was dropped in favor of a
transliterated and distorted version of his private name, is not explained. Concerning the change of title, Curtin states laconically, at the end (p. viii) of his "Prefatory Remarks" (plagiarized from Prus' "Introduction", which also appears in the book), that "The title of this volume has been changed from 'The Pharaoh' to 'The Pharaoh and the Priest,' at the wish of the author." Curtin's English version of the novel is incomplete, lacking the striking
epilog that closes the novel's sixty-seven chapters. If in Sienkiewicz's
Rodzina Połanieckich Curtin rendered "
Monachium" (
Polish for "
Munich") as "Monachium" (which is meaningless in English), in Prus'
Pharaoh (chapter 1) he renders "
Zatoka Sebenicka" ("
Bay of Sebennytos") as "Bay of Sebenico". Curtin's
translation style may be gauged by comparing a 2020 rendering of a passage from chapter 49, with Curtin's version published in 1902. In this passage the protagonist, Prince Ramses, reproves the priest Pentuer, a scion of peasants: In Curtin's version: The Curtin version certainly illustrates the "thee"–"thou"
archaisms discussed earlier. It also shows pure mistranslations: "peasants" as "laborers" and "toilers"; "murdered" as "killed"; "drew the Nile mud" as "dipped up muddy water from the Nile"; "cows" as "milch cows"; and most egregiously, "the lice-ridden of this world" (literally, in the original, "those whom lice bite") as "he... who bites lice." ==Analysis of
Memoirs==