Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero

by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Overview

Quo Vadis is the tale of a Roman general in Nero's army in the first century A.D. who risks everything when he falls in love with a Christian woman. This classic novel reveals a divided society. On one side is Rome's aristocracy, the picture of godless extravagance and excess. On the other are the city's persecuted Christians, vilified and thrown to lions as scapegoats for the burning of Rome.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780895263452
Publisher:	Skyhorse Publishing
Publication date:	11/01/1998
Series:	Gateway Movie Classics
Pages:	687
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz (1846 - 1916) was a Polish journalist, novelist and the Nobel Prize laureate. He is best remembered for his historical novels, especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis (1896). Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in Russian-ruled Congress Poland, in the late 1860s Sienkiewicz began publishing journalistic and literary pieces. In the late 1870s he traveled to the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. In the 1880s he began serializing novels that further increased his popularity. He soon became one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 20th century and numerous translations gained him international renown, culminating in his receipt of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer."

Jeremiah Curtin (6 September 1835 - 14 December 1906) was an American translator and folklorist. Harold B. Segel writes about Curtin's translations of works by Henryk Sienkiewicz:
. . . Curtin was an indefatigable, diligent, and reasonably accurate translator, but he lacked any real feeling for language. Despite occasional lapses, the translations are acceptably faithful to the original, yet much of the time they are stilted and pedestrian. This results, at times, as [the American translator Nathan Haskell Dole had remarked [in 1895], from the location of the adverb in final position (even when this is not the Polish word order).[...] The "inelasticity" [that the Briton, Sir Edmund William Gosse spoke of [in 1897] is perhaps nowhere so clearly evident in Curtin's translations as in his insistence on rendering koniecznie as "absolutely" in all circumstances.