Jeremiah Curtin

He and his wife, Alma Cardell Curtin, traveled extensively, collecting ethnological information, from the Modocs of the Pacific Northwest to the Buryats of Siberia.

They made several trips to Ireland, visited the Aran Islands, and, with the aid of interpreters, collected folklore in southwest Munster and other Gaelic-speaking regions.

While continuing to improve his Russian language skills, he also studied Czech, Polish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hungarian, and Turkish.

The first part of the book is a travelogue; the last two-thirds is a record of the mythology of the Buryat people,[8] including a prose summary of Gesar as performed by Manshuud Emegeev.

In 1905, he was asked by President Theodore Roosevelt to serve at the peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

Curtin visited Ireland on five occasions between 1871 and 1893,and collected folkloric material in southwest Munster, the Aran Islands, and other Irish language regions with the help of interpreters.

He also published a series of articles in The New York Sun, later edited and republished as Irish Folk Tales by Séamus Ó Duilearga in 1944.

In 1900 Curtin translated The Teutonic Knights by Sienkiewicz, the author's major historic novel about the Battle of Grunwald and its background.

Subsequently, he rendered the other two volumes of the author's Trilogy, other works by Sienkiewicz, and in 1897 his Quo Vadis, "[t]he handsome income ... from [whose] sale ... gave him ... financial independence ..."[13] and set the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, on its feet.

In 1897, Curtin's first meeting with Sienkiewicz, like his earlier first contact with the latter's writings, came about by sheer chance, in a hotel dining room at the Swiss resort of Ragatz.

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.

The "odd foreign tone" mentioned by Dole can most often be attributed to Curtin's too literal translation and inept handling of idioms....

The [London] Athenaeum review of [Sienkiewicz]'s Children of the Soil [i.e., Rodzina Połanieckich—The Połaniecki Family] in 1896 suggested, furthermore, that Curtin's use of "thou" and "thee" in the addresses of friends and relatives contributed to the stiffness of the translations.

Second person singular verbal and pronominal forms are, with rare exceptions, handled by Curtin in the archaic English fashion.

[14]Segel cites a series of mistranslations perpetrated by Curtin due to his carelessness, uncritical reliance on dictionaries, and ignorance of Polish idiom, culture, history and language.

[16] Contemporary critics were dismayed at Curtin's gratuitous, outlandish modifications of the spellings of Polish proper names and other terms, and at his failure to provide adequate annotations.

[18][19] Sienkiewicz himself, who had spent time in America and knew the English language, wrote to the translator: I have read with diligent attention all the volumes of my works sent me (American Edition).

Polish friends had urged him to translate it, and he had himself found it "a powerful novel, well conceived and skillfully executed"; he declared its author a "deep and independent thinker."

It also shows pure mistranslations: "peasants" as "laborers" and "toilers"; "murdered" as "killed"; "drew the Nile mud" as "dipped up muddy water from the Nile"; "cows" as "milch cows"; and most egregiously, "the lice-ridden of this world" (literally, in the original, "those whom lice bite") as "he... who bites lice.