Pan Tadeusz : The Last Foray in Lithuania

Christopher A. Zakrzewski is British-born, with a B.A. in modern languages (University of Guelph), an M.A. in Russian Language and Literature (University of Waterloo), and several years of doctoral work in Slavic philology (University of British Columbia).

His expertise is Polish Romantic Poetry. He has published the only significant English-language fragment of Pan Beniowski by Juliusz Slowacki, the complete cycle of Crimean Sonnets by Adam Mickiewicz, and recently completed a major new prose rendering of Mickiewicz’s 10,000-line masterpiece Pan Tadeusz, which has been serialized by Sarmatian Review (Rice University, Houston, Texas). The Polish Review in New York also published the work (described as a “new annotated translation in elegant English prose”) as an electronic book as part of its newly launched Library of Polish Classics Series (208/30 Press).

Among the contemporary Polish writers he has translated into English are Kazimierz Braun, Maciej Patkowski, Joanna Rostropowicz-Clark, and Bronislaw Wildstein.

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz  24 December 1798 – 26 November 1855) was a Polish poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and political activist. He is regarded as national poet in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. A principal figure in Polish Romanticism, he is counted as one of Poland's "Three Bards" and is widely regarded as Poland's greatest poet. He is also considered one of the greatest Slavic and European poets and has been dubbed a "Slavic bard". A leading Romantic dramatist, he has been compared in Poland and Europe to Byron and Goethe.

He is known chiefly for the poetic drama Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and the national epic poem Pan Tadeusz. His other influential works include Konrad Wallenrod and Grazyna. All these served as inspiration for uprisings against the three imperial powers that had partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth out of existence.