Jeremiah Curtin

[
Henryk Sienkiewicz, author of "Quo Vadis"]

Jeremiah Curtin (September 6, 1835 – December 14, 1906, Vermont) was an American translator and folklorist.

Life

Born in Milwaukee, WisconsinFact|date=August 2008 (some sourcesWho|date=August 2008 say Detroit, Michigan, [http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentissue/full_feature_story.asp?NewMessageID=19370] Curtin graduated from Harvard College in 1863. In 1864 he went to Russia, where he worked as both a translator and for the U.S. legation. He left Russia in 1877, stayed a year in London, and returned to the United States, where he worked for the Bureau of Ethnology.

His specialties were his work with American Indian languages and Slavic languages.

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). He also published an English version of Bolesław Prus' only historical novel, "Pharaoh", under the title "The Pharaoh and the Priest" (1902).

Translations from Polish

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 ("sic!") languages that "Jeremiah Curtin [in his] travel [s] over the wide world... learn [ed] to speak." Curtin apparently knew little or no Polish before he 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 [...] " [H.B. Segel, "Sienkiewicz's First Translator, Jeremiah Curtin," "The Slavic Review", vol. XXIV, no. 2 (June 1965), pp. 205, 192–96] 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".

Later 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.

Also in 1897, during a Warsaw visit, Curtin learned from 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 excelled Prus' novel "Pharaoh". Curtin read "Pharaoh", enjoyed it and decided to translate it in the future. [H.B. Segel, p. 197.]

Having both Polish and Russian interests, Curtin scrupulously avoided publicly favoring either people in their historic neighbors' quarrels [H.B. Segel, pp. 197-98.] (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).

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. [H.B. Segel, pp. 199–200.]

In 1900 Curtin translated The Teutonic Knights by Sienkiewicz, the author's major historic novel about the Battle of Grunwald and its background.

ienkiewicz

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. [H.B. Segel, pp. 209–10.]

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!" [H.B. Segel, p. 212.]

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. [H.B. Segel, pp. 208–9.]

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." [H.B. Segel, p. 214.]

Prus

Christopher Kasparek has demonstrated that, if anything, Curtin did still worse by Sienkiewicz's "profounder" compatriot, Bolesław Prus. [Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' "Pharaoh" and Curtin's Translation," "The Polish Review", vol. XXXI, nos. 2–3 (1986), pp. 127–35.]

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. [Christopher Kasparek, pp. 132–33.]

If in Sienkiewicz's "Rodzina Połanieckich" Curtin mindlessly rendered "Monachium" (Polish for "Munich") as "Monachium" (which is meaningless in English), in Prus' "Pharaoh" (chapter 1) he renders "Zatoka Sebenicka" ("Bay of Sebennytos") equally mindlessly as "Bay of Sebenico." [Christopher Kasparek, p. 133.]

The pattern of using "thee's" and "thou's" continues unabated, and in this context is not so much evocative of antiquity, as simply irritating.

Curtin's translation style may be gauged by comparing a 2001 rendering of a passage from chapter 49 with, secondly, Curtin's version published a century earlier (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 gratuitous "thee"–"thou" archaisms discussed earlier. It also shows pure "mis"translations: "peasants" ("fellahin") as "laborers" or "toilers"; "murdered" as "killed"; "drew the Nile mud" as "dipped up muddy water from the Nile"; "cows" as "milch cows"; and most strikingly, "the lice-ridden of this world" (literally, in the original, "those whom lice bite") as "he... who bites lice." [Christopher Kasparek, pp. 133-34.]

Moreover, in the liberties that Curtin takes with the original Polish sentence structure (which is preserved in the first, 2001 version), he is actually "paraphrasing" rather than (translating literally).

Qualities

As a translator of Polish literature into English, Jeremiah Curtin shows serious deficits in all the attributes of a competent translator, which should include:
*familiarity with the subject matter;
*a very good knowledge of the language, written and spoken, "from which" he is translating (the source language);
*an excellent command of the language "into which" he is translating (the target language);
*a profound understanding of the etymological and idiomatic correlates between the two languages; and
*a finely tuned sense of when to "" ("translate literally") and when to "paraphrase", so as to assure true rather than spurious "equivalents" between the source- and target-language texts.

Bibliography

*"Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland", 1890.
*"Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World", 1895.
*"Creation Myths of Primitive America", 1898.
*"A Journey in Southern Siberia", 1909.
*"Seneca Indian Myths", 1922.

ee also

*Jeremiah Curtin House
*Folkloristics
*Translation

Notes

ources

*H.B. Segel, "Sienkiewicz's First Translator, Jeremiah Curtin," "The Slavic Review", vol. XXIV, no. 2 (June 1965), pp. 189-214.
*Christopher Kasparek, "Prus' "Pharaoh" and Curtin's Translation," "The Polish Review", vol. XXXI, nos. 2–3 (1986), pp. 127–35.
*Bolesław Prus, "Pharaoh", translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek, Warsaw, Polestar Publications, and New York, Hippocrene Books, 2001.

External links

*:
**"Quo Vadis"
* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mfli/index.htm "Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland"]
* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfgw/index.htm "Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World"]
* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/ca/cma/index.htm "Creation Myths of Primitive America"]
* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/asia/jss/index.htm "A Journey in Southern Siberia"]
* [http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/iro/sim/index.htm "Seneca Indian Myths"]
* [http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/lhbum:@field(DOCID+@lit(lhbum52353)): His memoirs]