Written in 1828, during Mickiewicz’s stay in Russia, ‘The Faris’ is a Byronic epic poem about a lone Romantic protagonist against a backdrop of an Eastern, desert landscape. Mickiewicz made the protagonist a Bedouin rider dashing across the endless spaces and conquering adversity as he rushed toward boundless freedom and power. The poem was dedicated to traveller and Orientalist Wacław Rzewuski, on whom the protagonist was based.
Crucially, in writing ‘The Faris’ Mickiewicz drew from the classical Arabic qaṣīda, considered to be the most perfect form of old Arabic poetry: metrically complex and traditionally containing a description of a beautiful horse or a journey upon one. At any rate, this is not the first and only time when Mickiewicz drew from Arabic poetry – he had works based on such classics of Arab poetry as Al-Shanfarā and Al-Mutanabbi, and had even adapted one of Lokman’s fairy tales. In the spirit of the times, his knowledge and imagination of Arabic poetry mainly came from French translations, but also from his friend from Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), the great Arabic scholar Józef Sękowski. The artistic effect Mickiewicz achieved in these works is a far cry, however, from learned erudition or Orientalising clichés.
‘The Faris’ is also one of Mickiewicz’s most artistically refined pieces. Imitating the qaṣīda, the poet uses a shifting and complex versification structure. The result is a series of marvellous, remarkably dynamic poetic images, whose themes include the mad dash of the rider, rendered through quite unusual and innovative techniques.
All this means that the poem had to be an enormous challenge for any potential translator. And yet ‘The Faris’ did get translated. What’s more, Mickiewicz’s epic poem of the Bedouin rider garnered astonishing response, and even popularity, precisely in the very places he so brilliantly described. Under the sun of the Arabian desert.
