Trivia / Sienkiewicz Trilogy

• Bad Export for You: English versions of the books and film(s) tend to have... issues.
  • Jeremiah Curtin wrote an awkward and extremely literal translation around the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. He wasn't fluent in Polish and relied heavily on dictionaries and his knowledge of Russian. This translation is in the public domain, so it's fairly easy to get a copy of this version. For starters, he seems to confuse Russians and Ukrainians...
  • Samuel A. Binion translated With Fire and Sword a few years after Curtin did... but he didn't translate either of its sequels.
  • Polish-American novelist Wiesław S. Kuniczak wrote another translation in the 1990s, with the intent of creating a "modern, more accessible" version. However, unlike Curtin's overly literal translation, his translation suffers from the opposite problem: he freely deleted passages and added many of his own. Kuniczak is himself an award-winning writer, so his changes do fit seamlessly into the rest of the text, but they are changes and the result is a slightly different story than the one Sienkiewicz actually wrote. Kuniczak's translation is currently out of print, and used copies can be expensive.
  • The English-dubbed version of the With Fire and Sword movie is decent... until someone speaks in Ukrainian. Then it happens to still have the original Voiceover Translation from the Polish TV version that was used for DVD transfer, with all three voices played at once, being very distracting even to people used to voiceover translations. To make matters worse, nothing was altered in a Blu-Ray release, keeping the bad audio.
• Genre Popularizer:
  • As a whole the Trilogy, and especially Pan Wołodyjowski, popularised the concept of historical fiction novels in Poland. This became Sienkiewicz's speciality, too.
  • Film adaptation of With Fire and Sword lead to emergence of a period-specific fiction literature, with the so-called "sarmatian adventure" becoming a cottage industry of sorts for a small group of writers ever since.
• The Other Darrin: Zagłoba is played by a different actor in each movie: Mieczysław Pawlikowski in Pan Wołodyjowski, Kazimierz Wichniarz in The Deluge and Krzysztof Kowalewski in With Fire and Sword.
• Money, Dear Boy: Despite the famous and memetic "to uplift the hearts" declaration Sienkiewicz often made in public, his actual motivation, evident from his diaries and letters, was in cold cash. This is also why the books were published first as serialized pieces in newspapers - he got more money from such deal than by sending finished manuscripts to a publisher. And ironically, the least diabetobus and sappy Pan Wołodyjowski was only written thanks to the financial success the previous two books ended up being, rather than any patriotic or artistic statement - and it shows in its plot, too.
• Out of Order: The adaptations were filmed in reverse order, for political and financial reasons. Reportedly the director of all three, Jerzy Hoffman, read the trilogy in reverse order as a child.
• Referenced by...: The expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, “Hearts of Stone”, references characters and events of these novels mostly through one of its main antagonists, Olgierd von Everec.
• Sequel Gap: The film adaptations of the books are from 1969, 1974... and 1999, being so far apart, Daniel Olbrychski could play a father of a character he played 30 years prior.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Sienkiewicz reportedly sent letters to his editor asking "Whom did I kill so far?", as the novels were originally serialized in newspapers. Pay particular attention to With Fire and Sword and you'll notice that a minor character who gets beheaded fairly early on, is sent to deliver some important letters later.
• You Look Familiar: Daniel Olbrychski was cast in all three movie adaptations: as Azja in Pan Wołodyjowski, Kmicic in The Deluge and thanks to Sequel Gap, Tuhaj-Bej (Azja's father) in With Fire and Sword.

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