Someone shared with me today a nice review, published in the Spectator, by Boyd Tonkin of a new translation of the great work of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz.

In remote Soplicowo, its flower-filled meadows, ringed by deep woods where bears, auroch and bison — ‘the forest’s emperors’ — hold sway, family quarrels echo in miniature the convulsions of Europe. Young Master (‘Pan’) Tadeusz returns from his studies in Vilnius to the manor where his uncle, the Judge, runs the estate. The fate of Tadeusz’s absent father Jacek, a fabled hell-raiser, casts a long thread of suspense that Mickiewicz spins at the close into a deftly-managed coup.

As the callow heir falls first for the sophisticated Madame Telimena and then her teenage ward, the garden-loving Zosia, a Romeo-and-Juliet motif sounds. A match between the pair might ‘reunite two feuding houses’. For now, the Soplicas — Tadeusz’s lot — and their Horeszko neighbours, Zosia’s clan, remain at daggers (and cudgels, broadswords and muskets) drawn.

The rough-hewn gentry let off steam through hair-raising bouts of scrapping and drinking. In these parts, ‘lawsuits will always be superfluous’. Vodka-fuelled posses enforce court orders in ‘forays’. Think Henry Fielding’s rambunctious squire-archy, with a steeper body-count, and higher alcoholic proof.