A Precious Work

I read the book decades ago, so I've forgotten portions, but some scenes still remain with me. I know there is an Italian scene that is one of the most beautiful, poetically, ever rendered by Sienkiewicz. I'm pretty sure that there is no battle, as Sienkiewicz still didn't get up to one before outside events and his death intruded. Curiously, perhaps because he knew he had to take a pause, he ends what he had written with a scene that duplicates somewhat how he ended ON THE FIELD OF GLORY, another unfinished work that was nevertheless published as a complete book.

Despite being an unfinished work, THE LEGIONS is brimming with much that showcases Sienkiewicz's impressive talents as a writer of epic historical fiction. There is also a freshness to the work, a vibrancy of exploring a new period of history, that gives the reader vigorous images of what might have been and that is satisfactory on its own. THE LEGIONS is, I would say, the most precious of Sienkiewicz's work, one that allows us to meet our beloved author once again and share in his enthusiasms and his dreams before he left us.

The Inspiration

This is the book that began my fascination, at times obsession, with translating. I was in my teens, and I had read several of Henryk Sienkiewicz's epic historical novels in the Jeremiah Curtin English translations. My father, I found out, had a Sienkiewicz novel in his collection that I knew nothing about and that had never been translated. The title, LEGIONY (THE LEGIONS), was instantly captivating and impelled visions of another great, and unknown, historical epic from this master writer. It took place in the Napoleonic Period when Polish fighters joined up with Napoleon to change the map and governments of Europe and, importantly for the Polish, to liberate Poland from foreign occupation. This was a time that was rife with Romanticism, and Sienkiewicz, being a superb Romanticist, was perfectly suited to write about this period and its people and its heroes.

As soon as I realized that the book was available to me and had never been translated into English, I determined to translate it. I needed a solid Polish dictionary, for, though I was raised in a Polish home, I was not born or brought up in Poland, and in many ways considered Polish my second language, though it was undoubtedly the first language I spoke. My father ordered from Poland a two-volume Polish/English dictionary, which I still have to this day, and which has served me so well that the Polish to English volume has come apart from use, with several pages missing.

The book pictured above is the actual book from my father's collection. As you can see it was published by the Instytut Literacki, in Rome, in 1946. The softbound book carries its own romance with it. The pages have been browned through age for decades now, and the smell of the pages is delightful and brings one to another time, another place, after the Second World War, when Polish people in exile were beginning new lives in different countries throughout the world. The irony of what the novel was about and the then-current situation Poland found itself in, under the dominance of foreign power, is clear.

When I received the two-volume dictionary, I instantly began translating into a spiral-bound notebook, which I still have. Like Sienkiewicz, but for different reasons (so far!), I never finished my work on this book. I didn't get far, but I always had the dream of finishing what had been unfinished by Sienkiewicz and by me. And so now, this is what I'm attempting to do.