The Undivine Comedy, and Other Poems/Preface
PREFACE.
It is certainly the duty of a translator to be thoroughly convinced of the intrinsic merit of any work he may propose to translate, for he will be in a measure responsible for its influence upon the minds of those to whom he may introduce it. No hope of sudden success should dazzle him into unworthy labor. Let him first ascertain if the proposed work be one of general human interest, calculated to increase the moral worth of the people to whom it is to be offered, to express the influential conceptions of an original mind, open a new literature, throw light upon the hidden history of an epoch, or develop the characteristics of a nation;—if any one of the above conditions be met, then is the translator justified in transplanting the quickening germs into the mental being of his own countrymen, to bloom in wider consciousness, in fairer actions.
It is claimed that the translations herewith offered meet not only one, but all of the above conditions.
That the works of Krasinski are of "general human interest" is proved by the fact that, even under their anonymous publication, they were enthusiastically received by the critics of Europe, and immediately translated into French and German; that "they are calculated to increase the moral worth of the people to whom they are offered," is evident in that they contain a genuine attempt to introduce the sublime ethics of Christianity into the vexed and vicious sphere of modern politics; that "they embody the influential conceptions of an original mind," may be read in the fact that these "conceptions" modified the character of an entire People; that the translations open a "new literature" is clear, since they are the first specimens of modern Polish poetry as yet given to American readers; that they "throw light upon the history of an epoch and develop the characteristics of a nation," is manifest in the strange truth that, as stated by Julian Klaczko, only through the lessons of Krasinski can some of the startling occurrences of the last Polish revolution be interpreted at all.
A curious spectacle is spread before the utilitarian and material spirit of the nineteenth century in the closely interwoven history of our author and his unhappy country. A Christian Poet teaching only forgiveness, patience, and self-abnegation,—the possession of whose works in his native land was Siberia or death, and who, to shield those dear to him from the vengeance of the oppressor, was forced to publish anonymously,—has so influenced the action of a brave, injured, and fiery people, that only in his poems can be found the clue to deeds which puzzled the despot and astonished the world! Thus only can be explained that startling scene which occurred in Warsaw in February, 1861, when unarmed men, women, and children bared their breasts, and fell without resistance before the Russian battalions maddened by the sight of the unfurled Polish banner. For their poet had sung:
"Holy Spirit, who hast taught us that the most sublime power on earth is the power of self-sacrifice, that the most mighty of arguments is virtue, grant that through love we may win the nations to the end whereto we aspire!"
"To each Nation Thou hast given avocation, O Christ! A profound idea springing from Thee lives in each, and in it is the secret of its destiny! Some Thou hast elected to defend the cause of celestial Beauty, and to offer to the world an angelic example by hopefully bearing their heavy cross along a weary way overflowing with their blood . . . until they have given loftier and more divine ideas to men through their sublime struggles; given a holier charity, a wider fraternity, in exchange for the sword that has been plunged into their bosoms!
"Such a nation is thy Poland, O Lord Jesus!"
—Psalms of the Future, Krasinski.
And with such ideas did this patriot-poet succeed in impregnating a nation! To the eternal glory of Poland be it said, that, strengthened by the divine lessons of her Poet, she has hitherto been strong enough to resist all the temptations to avenge herself held out to her by Russia in the fell scheme of Pansclavism; that, having shed her generous blood on almost every battle-field in Europe, and having been deserted and betrayed by those whom she so faithfully served, she still bares her own breast to the pitiless knife of the Czar, rather than aid him to whet it anew for the heart of the civilized world! She knows the fury of the Russian Bear too well to let slip a single link of the chain she still holds in her manacled and wounded hands. Let the Russianized pansclavists of Bohemia call her the “Judas of the Sclaves;” England continue to temporize until India is lost and her own doom is near; Greece change the indolent Turk for the Muscovite Czar; France, conquered of old under the Great Napoleon in Russia because of his treachery to the martyred nation, and fallen beneath the armed heel of the ruthless Teuton under Napoleon the Little, seek a new ally in Russia as she cries in her terror “à bas les Polonais;” Italy wrap herself in her old indifference with regard to the fate of all “Northern Barbarians;” Austria in her fright strive to conciliate Galicia while losing Bohemia; Prussia rejoice in irritating stolen Posen, and join the oppressor in his designs until, having found his way through Vienna to Constantinople, the prophecy of Frederick the Great is fulfilled: “When Russia possesses Constantinople, two years later she will be in Konigsberg; young America bend her spotless brow as the bandage is wound round her flashing eyes, that she may not see the pool of blood surrounding the Autocrat;—the Polish Eagle does not quail; finding no home on earth, she spreads her snowy wings, mounts into the sky of holy sacrifice, and hopes, ‘because she there sees God!’”
These works of Krasinski “introduce a new literature to the American public.” Translations from the French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Persian, Hindoostanee, etc., are placed before us, but, as if the Russian censor ruled our press, for us Niemciewicz, Mickiewicz, Chodzko, Vincent Pol, Slowacki, Lelewel, Duchinski, Trentowski, Ostrowski, etc., etc., have suffered, written, sung, reasoned, and prophesied in vain. Have we any life of the great and good Kosciuszko, or the brave and fiery Pulaski?
In 1855 the astute Russian, Pogodin, wrote to his own government: “The time has come in which we should seek an alliance with America.” If an assassin can obtain the friendship and recommendation of a powerful friend of known honor and magnanimity, his nefarious schemes against the innocent may be pursued in comparative safety. Much has been said on the unbridled license of an untrammeled Press, but as great a danger lies in its purchased silence. Falsehood and exaggeration o’erleap their aims, destroy themselves, and perish in the light of liberty; but silence veils ghastly secrets, and crime securely revels under its close shroud. How is the alliance of America to be won? Silence! Stifle the cries of the victims who for the last hundred years have been crimsoning with their blood the white deserts of Siberia; the rattling of chains in the wastes of Tobolsk and the mountains of the Caucasus; the moans and sobs of an entire People we have resolved to destroy; the multitudinous cries of widows and bereaved orphans! This subtle policy has been skillfully pursued; and where silence has been impossible, history has been falsified, ethnography outraged, religious prejudices evoked, and the character of the Polish People traduced, that the deception might be complete. For, with Poland crushed and Constantinople won, Europe lies at the feet of the Mongolian-German, and, robed as an angel of emancipation and communistic light, he may Russify civilization at leisure.
With every generation since her partition, Poland has entered her united rejection of the iniquitous rule of her foes, by an attempted revolution, in which the awful protest has been signed in the blood of her martyred children,—men, women, and children alike ready to die in this solemn denial of voluntary subjugation.
The last disastrous attempt of Poland to arise from her sepulchre, occasioned by measures insulting to universal humanity, occurred during our own civil war. Russia endeavored to make it appear that the rebellion in America and the attempted revolution of the Poles were phenomena bearing a similar character. No idea could be more erroneous, for the struggle in Poland was to restore legitimate authority to its rightful holders, to a government truly liberal, representative, and Polish; while our revolted States sought to wrest authority from the legallyelected rulers, the Congress of the United States. The resurrection in Poland meant union, life; the rebellion, division and destruction. The one sought to bring about general emancipation, the other to prolong slavery.
But in the hands of Russia all facts are wax, which her political artists mould to serve their own purposes. While branding the Poles throughout her own realm and monarchic Europe as freethinkers, republicans, and jacobins, she makes a sudden turn, and denounces them here as bigots, aristocrats, slaveholders, and despots, and their insurrection as but an attempt of the nobility to regain their ancient status,—a feudal conspiracy! Hear, shade of Kosciuszko!
Poland has long been anxious for the emancipation of her serfs, not only as moved by the advancing humanity of the world, but as a means of national power. Sword in hand, she defended it in the confederation of Bar, in 1768; discussed it in the diets of 1776, 1780, 1788, and finally adopted it by the famous Constituent Assembly of 1791. Kosciuszko, May 7, 1794, then Dictator of Poland, issued a document giving entire personal freedom to all the serfs; and on the 22d of January, 1863, the members of the National Polish Government decreed that the peasants were not only free, but were entitled to a certain portion of land, of which they should be sole proprietors. But emancipation would have made Poland too strong for her enemies, by uniting all classes,—and the oppressor would not permit it! Only six months after the noble decree of Kosciuszko occurred the terrible massacre of Praga, which quenched the contemplated emancipation in gore, and the following year the very name of Poland was—at least for a time—effaced from the political chart of Europe! In later days, the petitions addressed to the Emperor Ferdinand I., by the States of Leopol, 26th September, 1845, for the suppression of serfage and corvee, led to the massacres in Gallicia, and the destruction of the Republic of Cracow. Poland has been literally drenched in blood ever since her last emancipatory act of 1863. It is about as fair to accuse Poland of the permission of serfage during the last hundred years as it would be to accuse Abraham Lincoln and Whittier of being promoters of slavery! Yet this is precisely what Russia did, in order to assimilate the insurrection of Poland with our own rebellion, representing it as originating in the desire to support feudalism, in the very face of the first words promulgated by the Polish Committee, January 22, 1863: “All the sons of Poland, without any distinction of faith or race, descent or station, are free and equal citizens of the country.”
Strong and startling are the contrasts between the United States and Poland. We are young, powerful, active, happy, the bulwark of freedom, the hope of oppressed Peoples;—Poland has lived through many centuries; has been since her dismemberment so fettered that all action, save in the spasms of her revolutions, has been impossible; has been rendered utterly wretched, her body mutilated and thrice stabbed to the heart, and all that is material about her stifled in a living sepulchre. And yet there are striking points of resemblance. Both nations are daringly brave; both are confederatively formed,—Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia, uniting in 1569, being the first voluntary confederation in Europe; both prefer elective governments; both are opposed to religious persecution and oppression; both detest foreign domination, and love liberty better than life. And as if Heaven itself would draw the two countries in still closer communion, the idolized heroes of both nations, Washington and Kosciuszko, bound by congenial friendship, stood breast to breast in the great contest for American freedom. Material aid being utterly impossible, and in every aspect impolitic, yet in the higher world of justice the moral sympathy of the triumphant with the wronged and murdered Nation must be deep and true; her injuries will be exposed by the statesmen of freedom, and the tortures to which she is constantly subjected will flow in the burning words of fiery indignation from the eloquent lips of the freemen of America! Is this so? Alas! silence! silence!
But why call up this terrible spectacle of a great Aryan Nation in her agony, with the prolonged death-rattle in her throat; why lift the shroud of anguish from entire generations, fathers, sons, daughters, infiints, all driven into dissolution by a barbaric and relentless foe, the ruin of schools and universities, the destruction of libraries, the deportation of students, the transplantation and consequent slaughter of thousands of innocent children, the forcible transportation of thirty thousand helpless inhabitants into the Caucasus, the desecration of maidens, the tortures of patriots, the knoutings of heroes, boys and matrons, and the persecution of the oldest form of Christian faith? Because the victim is not dead, and there is vast moral power in the force of public opinion. Because the American mission is the actualization everywhere of not merely nominal, but real freedom, founded upon justice and eternal truth. But chiefly it is done in the present relation, because it is our ardent desire that the Polish poet should be understood in all his sublime patriotism by American readers, and to show that his deepest hues are not so dark as the truth they depict; because, for full sympathy with his original conceptions, we must recognize his own sad stand-point, and the melancholy position of the country he so earnestly loved. For poet and people hold positions entirely exceptional in the history of the world,
Poles and exiles! it is with no light feeling of selfdistrust that the daughter of a distant land has ventured to lay her daring hands upon the master-works of your poet, patriot, and statesman. She would fain have called the high poets of her country to the task of transmuting the thoughts of the Polish Dante into fitting English; but none seemed ready to begin the work. Wreathing their lyres with their own immortal flowers, singing their songs of freedom for the emancipation, cultivation, and delight of humanity,—some of them perchance momentarily charmed by the mystic might of Russia,—none were prepared to burn the torch of their own genius to illume the spiritual and majestic features of your illustrious dead. Feeble as may be the fire of this torch as now borne, sway and flicker as it may in the uncertain hands, may its light yet be strong enough to manifest something of the valiant “Polish soul” to my countrymen! Strong enough to point out to future translators the unexplored treasures of Polish literature, in order that in more inspired versions they may yet place “The Undivine Comedy” and “Iridion” where they deserve to rank,—after Dante and Shakespeare, among the loftiest creations of human genius.
I know that through the medium of a less impassioned language, and deprived of their exquisite form and bold and undulating rhythm, these poems will seem cold and imperfect in your eyes, but I beg of you to pardon the deficiencies, because of the difficulty of the task and the love and reverence which prompt its execution.
Whatever the material, venal, and passing phantoms of the hour may seem to say, believe not that American hearts have ceased to beat in unison with yours! Your courageous struggles for “a country” maybe still misrepresented and misunderstood; the brilliant serf-emancipation in Russia may for a time dazzle us into ignorance of the atrocious torments to which you are subjected, but misconception not voluntary cannot long endure, the Sun of Truth is everywhere rising and everywhere dispersing the mists of falsehood under its happy light, true republicans will learn that “the path to freedom lies not through the charnel-house.” Right, not might, is the cornerstone of God's kingdom upon earth!
Liberty, justice, equality before the law, and self-government, are the normal dogmas of our political creed; to renounce them were to stultify ourselves. They are cornerstones in the temple we are building for the refuge of men; to uproot them were to bring it in ruins about our own heads.
We know that, tortured and mutilated, Poland still lives, and that, at every banquet of the “Holy Alliance,” her grand and bloody form rises from her three graves to appal the three crowned and rival murderers of a nation. For she is buried, not in the corruption of the grave, but in the loyal hearts of her patriotic and tortured children, in the living sympathies of all who love virtue, self-sacrifice, and heroism, and in the eternal justice of God;—therefore is her resurrection certain!