Prof. Boyde: Polish masterpiece is coming to Cambridge

„Pan Tadeusz” w adaptacji teatralnej zostanie wystawiony w Cambridge 19 i 20 lutego 2020. Reżyserem spektaklu jest Patrick Boyde, poliglota, profesor italianistyki na Uniwersytecie Cambridge, znawca literatury średniowiecznej i renesansowej, autor licznych publikacji na temat twórczości Dantego. Profesor Boyde był gościem programu Polish Waves na antenie Cambridge 105 Radio, w którym opowiedział o planowanym wydarzeniu, o swoich wrażeniach na temat „Pana Tadeusza”, oraz o swoich przygodach związanych z nauką języka polskiego, którą podjął w latach 50-tych ubiegłego wieku…
Z profesorem Patrickiem Boydem rozmawiał Sebastian Leśniewski.

A theatrical adaptation of „Pan Tadeusz” will be staged in Cambridge on 19 & 20 February 2020. The director of the performance is Patrick Boyde – a polyglot, a professor of Italian studies at the University of Cambridge, an expert in medieval and Renaissance literature as well as an author of numerous publications on Dante’s work. Professor Boyde was a guest of the Polish Waves program on Cambridge 105 Radio, in which he spoke about the event, about his impressions of „Pan Tadeusz” and adventures related to Polish studies, which he undertook in the 1950s. …
Interview with Professor Patrick Boyd by Sebastian Leśniewski.

Professor Patrick Boyde: We’re going to put on a shortened dramatisation of Pan Tadeusz, we shall do what I call a ‚semi-staging’ of this wonderful work.

What is a semi-staging?

In a semi-staging you have good readers, good voices, and they’ve carefully practised what they’re going to say, but they come up to music stands and they read as well as they can, with their voices and their faces to bring that text alive. So you focus on the word, you’re focusing on Mickiewicz and what he wrote, and you’re trying to make that come to life for a live audience.

Will the reading be in Polish?

The reading will be in Polish, that’s fundamental. I’ve been doing quite a few of these semi-stagings and they’ve always been in the original language, from ancient Greek and Latin, through to French, German, and also English.

Will the non-Polish people in the audience be able to follow the story?

They’ll be able to follow everything. I’m obsessed about being understood, so we have subtitles properly translated for the purpose, and in this case we’ll probably project not only the English version, but also the Polish text to help those who are not quite so used to reading Polish poetry as they used to be when they were younger. So everyone will be able to follow every word, whether or not they are native Polish speakers, or learners, or Brits without a word of Polish.

What is your main goal for this event?

Well, the main goal is to let people have a really good evening. You’re in this space for an hour and ten minutes or so, with the music, the images, the voices, and we cast a spell – people go away feeling absolutely exalted. I’m sure all the Poles who come along will go away thinking „This is a wonderful poem, I’m proud to be Polish”.

How did you adapt a 10-thousand-line poem into a 1-hour-10-minute play?

Well, obviously it’s a very complex plot with all sorts of strands, but what I’ve done is to concentrate on the love story, and follow through Tadeusz and Zosia, their story, the complications of Hrabia and Telimena, and leaving on one side, just alluding to it, the background story of the family feud, of the events in the 1790s, twenty years before the action of the play, when various murders were committed, how everything goes wrong, the presence of Napoleon in the background getting ready for his invasion of Russia, all those wonderful historical themes we’ll keep in the view, but we’re not going to dramatise them. So you’ll follow a love story, and I think the most helpful analogy is that of an opera, so you’ve got a tenor and a soprano, Tadeusz and Zosia, and you’ve got an alto and the baritone, they’re more interesting roles for the actor, who are Telimena and Hrabia. And we follow their flirtations, attachments, breakings up, through from the very astonishing opening, honestly, as a story of boy meeting girl the opening of Pan Tadeusz is unbeatable, and we follow it through to the betrothal.

Was it challenging to work with a text written in 13-syllable metre?

One of Mickiewicz’s great virtues is that the Polish metre, these rhyming couplets, thirteen syllables, is very relaxed. So it’s quite close to prose if you don’t do anything with it. You can emphasise the artistic side, you can emphasise the two halves of the line, or you can let it go much more flexibly and fluidly. I like to think of it as being like Chopin, so in the left hand you’ve got the metre, thirteen syllables and rhyming couplets, and in the right hand you’ve got this melody with rubato, delicate notes, and you just follow the feeling of it.

How did you come across Pan Tadeusz?

Well, it’s pure chance, and yet there’s a kind of logic to it. So for fifteen years I’ve been staging great poems or extracts of poems, so I’ve done Homer, and Virgil, and Milton, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and the last one I did in February was Tennyson’s Maud, and in that poem there is a line about Poland and Hungary and the revolutions of 1848. A friend of mine, Nicholas Bell, the librarian of Trinity said to me „Pat, have you ever thought of doing Pan Tadeusz?”, and that was when the idea dropped in my mind, I don’t know why it took hold. Nicholas Bell was the curator of a major exhibition on Chopin 2010 in the British Library, so he really knew the Polish context, that’s why he asked me. What he did now know is that among the languages I have studied was, 60 years ago, Polish. So it was a kind of challenge. I thought „Well, let me just look at this poem and see what I make of it”. And do you know, as soon as I got started, my love of this language, which I’d neglected for 60 years came back, and I realised just how incredibly good, and how incredibly pleasant it was. All that talk about a ‚national poem’ is a bit off-putting, I have to say that ‚Pan Tadeusz’ as a thing to say in English is not a particularly exciting sound or very intelligible, and if you go on to the subtitle, The Last Foray – Ostatni Zajazd, well it’s not very intelligible in Polish either. So I came guardedly, and I was conquered by it. And then I just settled down, I worked my way through and tried to recover the grammar that I used to know. Once I’d started work, I thought „Well yes, I want to show everyone in the outside world that Pan Tadeusz is up there with the Iliad and Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s plays.”

The first time you learned Polish was in the 1950s?

Yes, let me go back a bit, I’m now in my eighties, so I’m looking back a long way. I came up to Cambridge to study Italian and German in 1953. And I did three years and I got a first class degree with my Italian as my strong language. I then had to do my army service, so I was two years in the artillery, and after the first seven months or so there was time in hand, and I thought „I must learn some more languages, and I will try three languages with three different methods, pictures, and records, and grammar. And these three languages have got to be distinct from each other, and distinct from the languages I already know, French, German, Italian and a bit of Latin”. So I chose more or less at random Hebrew through pictures, modern Greek through records, and Polish through grammar. So it was a chance decision, but the Polish got hold of me. And I had myself sent from Poland the periodical called Świat. The envelopes were the most depressingly brown envelopes I’d ever seen in my life, the paper terrible, the printing terrible, the orthodoxy imposed by the communist regime pretty stifling. And yet through this paper received in this way I was picking up the tinglings, the ferments, all the things that would lead to the 1980s and to the modern day. The presence of the French culture, the presence of the Catholic culture, the presence of Latin, the hostility to the ‚Niemcy’ and the Russians. I mean this was a nation that simply had somehow to explode. So I studied it quite hard, I kept on throughout my first year when I came back to Cambridge and started studying Dante towards a doctorate, for the first hour in the morning, for a whole year, I used to read from 9 o’clock till 10 o’clock Świat, and a few novels. So in 1959 I’d never spoken Polish with anybody, I’d never had a teacher, but I put myself to the grammar, I did know what was going on. And then, alas, I had to get on with my thesis, I had to get on with life, and I had to raise four children and seven grandchildren, and do all the things that people do in their lives. And then came this amazing conversation with Nicholas Bell, and it all came together.