The Word: Two Hundred Years of Polish Poetry, translated by Marcel Weyland; Brandl & Schlesinger, 2010, 480 pages, $39.95.

A man may be an admirable poet without being an exact chronologer. 

—John Dryden

Almost ten long years have passed since Marcel Weyland published what must have appeared at the time as his magnum opus—the English translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz. It was a major triumph of dedication, hard work, patience and poetic inspiration. The silence that followed was, however, a very productive period. It came to fruition with the publication last year of an even more ambitious translation project: The Word. 

Weyland does not offer any conventionally chronological, pedestrian history of Polish poetry. What he proposes is a rather personal, occasionally idiosyncratic, selection of poems and poets who for various reasons attracted his attention in his meanderings through the rather complicated cultural and political history of Poland.