For over half a century, Anglophone Chopin enthusiasts curious for insights that only private writings can confide had but two choices: Chopin’s Letters, translated to English by Ethel Lilian Voynich (first published in 1931 and still in print), and Selected Correspondence of Fryderyk Chopin, translated by Arthur Hedley (1962).Footnote ¹ Both books relied on material compiled by Polish scholars – Henryk Opieński in Voynich’s case, Bronisław Sydow in Hedley’s – and both offered translations not only of Chopin’s Polish texts, but of items originally in French and German as well. Yet these volumes taken together account for only about three-quarters of the composer’s nearly 300 extant Polish writings, and their translations, while serviceable, often are imprecise, incomplete or lacking in nuance.Footnote ²

Fortunately, readers now have a third option. Chopin’s Polish Letters, translated by David Frick, gathers all of the composer’s Polish-language correspondence (letters, verses, greetings and diary extracts) into a single volume, meticulously rendered into English. A professor of Slavic languages and literatures at UC Berkeley, Frick offers lucid translations of Chopin’s often cipher-like writings (including numerous items previously unavailable) and thoughtfully groups them into eight periods of the composer’s life. Each of these sections is prefaced by brief, highly useful contextual details about places, events and individuals referenced in letters, while historical notes and full indexes are provided at the end of the volume. To aid in his task, Frick expertly avails himself of the most recent and reliable Chopin scholarship. But to appreciate the full value of this contribution, we would do well to examine some of the shortcomings of the previous translations.

Ethel Lilian Voynich, Irish-born Slavophilic author of the bestselling novel The Gadfly (1897), was the first to introduce Chopin’s correspondence to an English readership. Though mischaracterized as a ‘Chopin scholar’ by a generous back-cover copy-editor of the Dover edition of Chopin’s Letters, Voynich, daughter of the famous mathematician George Boole, was in fact a serious musician who had trained under Phillip Spitta at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Yet it was likely an enduring attraction to revolutionary politics and exilic figures, rather than to musicology, that drew her into Chopin’s literary world. Toward the end of the nineteenth century Voynich had become an active member of the London-based Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, serving as translator of its Russian-language periodical. Through this association, she met her future husband, the swashbuckling Wilfrid Michael Voynich (Michał Habdank-Wojnicz), a Lithuanian-born Polish radical recently escaped from years of exile in Siberia. In time Wilfrid Voynich settled into the life of an antiquarian book dealer, his own legacy secured by the discovery and acquisition of the so-called ‘Voynich manuscript’, a fifteenth-century illuminated codex composed in an invented alphabet that to this day has eluded all efforts at decryption. If Ethel’s union with Voynich lent her some degree of Polish fluency, it may also have ignited a passion for deciphering enigmatic missives.

Voynich did an admirable job with her challenging assignment. Translations generally attempt either to bring the source text to the language of the reader or to take the reader to the language of the source text, and Voynich mostly adheres to the former ‘free’ translation strategy intended to make Chopin’s writing as accessible as possible in English. The problem is that Chopin’s writing can at times be purposely problematic, and in her effort to smooth over complexities Voynich now and then obscures some of his most inventive prose. Take for example Chopin’s letter to his friend, Jan Białobłocki, from 8 July 1825, one of the earliest instances of the composer transcribing foreign words into phonetic Polish. It is intended as a clever puzzle for his friend to sort out, but Voynich dulls the game (and our own vicarious pleasure in it) by rendering the passage in straightforward French.

Frick, on the other hand, retains the original orthography, and in doing so not only shows us the composer toying with the conventions of language, but also conveys the deftness with which Chopin extends the conceit of his letter lacking logic into its graphic representation: a macaronic jumble.

While I must admit to finding Voynich’s ‘peas and cabbages’ (a calque of a genuine Polish expression) more appetizing than the stodgy ‘hodgepodge’ of Frick, Voynich, despite best intentions, occasionally takes things too far afield. Consider the composer’s letter to his family penned in Vienna a few days before Christmas 1830, in which the homesick Chopin, trying to inject a bit of cheer, drolly details the failed efforts of a party of non-Poles to dance the mazurka. The point of this tale is to share an in-group chuckle at the expense of these hapless outsiders: the Czech friend whose attempts lead to complete physical collapse; and a past-her-prime German countess ‘mincing’ bizarre waltz steps. But Voynich, misconstruing a nuance of Chopin’s prose, instead imagines a Polish folk dance that requires the impersonation of a prostrate barnyard animal:

Here, as so often, Frick’s is the correct translation, and catches just the right tone:

Voynich, to her credit, was comprehensive, translating every letter made available to her. Far less catholic in approach was the British musicologist Arthur Hedley who, while also favouring intelligibility over literal interpretation, nonetheless selected, edited and translated the correspondence with a gatekeeper’s censorious eye. Working from Bronisław Sydow’s posthumously published critical edition, Hedley notably added to the total number of Chopin letters available in English, yet passed over most of the early correspondence as well as swaths of Chopin’s lengthier writings, scattering the volume with tell-tale (and intriguing) trails of ellipses. Though the job of ‘selecting’ items from a large corpus of material often involves a degree of arbitrariness, Hedley’s stated policy was to omit letters that ‘deal with domestic events and persons of whom nothing definite can be known today’, adding that ‘even when research has thrown what light it can on the contents of these letters, they often prove to be of little interest or importance’.Footnote ³

The passage of time, however, has shown this rationale to have been mistaken. Steady efforts of a new generation of scholars in Poland and abroad have demonstrated that these early and incidental writings are indeed decipherable, and highly revealing. They shed valuable light on the circulation of music, knowledge, people and ideas in the rebellion-roiled Europe of the first half of the nineteenth century. The composer’s letter to his friend Jan Matuszyński, posted from Vienna during the throes of Poland’s 1830 November uprising, proves a fine case in point. Mingled with heartfelt concern for his loved ones, we encounter Chopin’s impressions of the season’s operatic offerings; his comparative estimations of Austrian and Polish vocal talent; his report on Vienna’s condescending attitude toward the Poles and the French; and references to the various figures in his expansive circle of friends and acquaintances (see Frick pp. 211–17). Readers of Hedley’s version, however, miss out on all these telling details.

It is therefore not only the accessibility and accuracy of Frick’s translations but also his aim of comprehensiveness that make this volume so welcome. Significantly, Frick translates for us in total the thorny and amusing Szafarnia letters Chopin sent to his family during two adolescent sojourns in the countryside. (Voynich includes none; Hedley offers just two fragments.) Modelling his dispatches on Warsaw’s Kurier Warszawski, Chopin parodies the newspaper’s format and content, transforming prosaic dramas of country life into more highbrow reportage:

Here we witness Chopin’s keen ear for the ways in which rural and urban preoccupations hilariously collide. Elsewhere these early letters take a more insensitive turn, as when Chopin caricatures the peasantry as blithely as he dignifies the livestock:

Foreign News

Reading such youthful reflections, one might understand why Hedley would have been reluctant to include them in his collection. Not only do they prove a formidable translation challenge, they also seem meaningless in explicating the artistry of the mature Chopin. Yet a more broad-minded approach reveals Chopin’s delight in novel encounters, a lively curiosity for different behaviours, customs and habits of speech that he reprises in subsequent letters. These early writings, in other words, let us trace the full arc of Chopin’s life, from a nurturing and cultured Polish upbringing to the refined manner with which he navigated experiences and relationships on a larger European stage in later years. The Szafarnia letters are thus more than merely evidence of encounters with the folk; they provide a first glimpse of Chopin’s personality and intellect, the imaginative ways he assimilated the world around him.

Fast forward some two decades, now to a French countryside. In a relatively settled existence with George Sand, during the floating days of summer, Chopin once again writes to his family. It is July 1845 and the composer, alone with his thoughts, returns to the previous summer when his sister and brother-in-law visited him there in Nohant. We encounter the now familiar style of improvisatory musing in which a thought or feeling (here, Chopin’s homesickness) initiates a stream of freely associated ideas intended to bring his loved ones nearer to him. Suspended in an exilic space he tries to describe earlier in his letter, Chopin first records the movements and whereabouts of an assortment of friends and notable figures, then settles on the topic of monuments – those objects that memorialize lives and assign memory to place. The death of an American Indian on tour in Paris prompts the composer to detail the bas-reliefs intended for a planned monument, with scenes of ‘their life over there’ a continent away, reminding Chopin, in turn, of Morse’s telegraph, that great annihilator of space and time:

Oke-wi-mi, wife of Little Wolf, perished not of homesickness as it turns out but, like Chopin, of that most quintessential Romantic disease: consumption. The monument so vividly depicted by the composer was never built due to inadequate funds; after five years Oke-wi-mi’s remains were moved from Montmartre cemetery and placed in a common grave. No doubt the subtext of this monument tale and the others Chopin included in his wonderfully meandering epistle was a fear of dying in a distant land, forgotten to the people and place he held most dear.

As much as the work of translation can offer insights on a range of historical topics, it also inherently sets up obstacles to cross-cultural understanding. Frick tries to mitigate the latter by judiciously choosing when to execute a purposeful distancing in his translations and when to render Chopin’s descriptive prose in the clearest form, as can be observed in the above examples. It is thus curious (and disappointing) that Frick decides as a rule to avoid literal translations of Polish proverbs and idioms. There is certainly a reader-centred logic to this choice, but at least a footnote where these native expressions occur would have given the reader a chance to witness Chopin’s creative use of Polish. Another concern is that only the first 80 entries of Frick’s volume are based on the new critical edition. (The remaining entries overwhelmingly rely on Bronisław Sydow’s 1955 collection.) With work on the next two volumes of the new edition proceeding as planned, it is puzzling why The Fryderyk Chopin Institute would have initiated this commission before full completion of that work. One hopes that a revised English translation will be forthcoming once the Polish team’s efforts are complete. Dare we dream of a complementary volume of Polish letters written to Chopin also expertly rendered into English by Frick?

Despite these quibbles, Chopin’s Polish Letters is a translation for our time, as Voynich and Hedley’s were for theirs. Though a reader fluent in Polish may be inclined to offer here and there an alternative word choice or turn of phrase, we can confidently trust that Frick’s translation conveys Chopin’s meaning with accuracy and appropriate tone. It will undoubtedly stimulate a younger generation of Anglophone scholars to ask new questions of Chopin’s life and music, and perhaps even venture beyond reductive nationalist narratives that have too long dominated scholarly attention. Meantime, Chopin enthusiasts can relish the opportunity to step foot in Chopin’s time and imagine for a moment the contours of his remarkable world.