HOME | DD
Theophilia — Prince Yeremi Vishnovyetski
#17th #century #commonwealth #history #hussar #hussars #noble #poland #polish #prince #sienkiewicz #sword #henryk #jeremi #magnate #yeremi #wiśniowiecki #fire #with #vishnovyetski #lithuanian
Published: 2017-01-06 06:01:42 +0000 UTC; Views: 7057; Favourites: 247; Downloads: 0
Redirect to original
Description
With Fire and Sword:Prince Yeremi Vishnovyetski
January 5th 2017
Ink, gouache, white charcoal
Toned paper
5x7 inches
I’ve been meaning to do portrait drawings of the characters from With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz for a long while now (since it’s one of my favorite books and too few people seem to know about it or have read the books). It took some encouragement from a friend who had also read the books to finally sit down and start sketching them out. Prince Yeremi Vishnovyetski (August 17th, 1612 – August 20th, 1651), also spelled Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, was a great Polish magnate and a very charismatic and successful military leader who fought against the Cossacks during the terrible Hmyelnitzki Uprising (1648—1651) that engulfed and consumed the Ukraine in bitter fighting. He is featured very prominently in the novel and he just so happens to be one of my favorite characters.
In the book he is described thus:A stranger seeing Prince Yeremi for the first time would find it hard to reconcile his slight, youthful body and almost girlish features with the towering legend that he had become. Barely into his thirties, the prince had inherited the long, soft black hair and pale skin of his Valachian mother and these gave him a gentle, delicate air that might have seemed effeminate to someone who didn’t know the man. But Skshetuski knew better than to trust appearances, these or any other. Those small-boned features already bore the iron stamp of war and the hard campaigning that had won the man his awesome reputation. The luminous black eyes housed sleeping thunderheads, he knew, and God help him who drew those hidden lightnings on himself! Not even the most experienced diplomats and courtiers could bear to look into those eyes for long; they contained such a natural sense of majesty and power that all heads bowed before him without a second thought. This was a man who knew his own greatness and the full power of his vast resources and he had no mercy for anyone who questioned his authority. If an imperial crown were suddenly thrust upon his head, Pan Jan thought, he’d be neither surprised by it nor crushed by its weight.
…
Ruthlessness, courage and readiness to shoulder the most terrible responsibilities lived side by side in this strange single-minded man, along with a fierce, overweening pride, impatience with anyone who failed to grasp his own lofty vision, and a passionate devotion to his country and for what it stood…On the other hand, he provided homes and lifelong care for four thousand orphans, built either a cathedral or a temple for every faith and sect in his territory, founded five colleges in which the sons of the tenantry were educated at no cost, and turned his capital of Lubnie into a haven for the homeless and the dispossessed whom he provided with lands, training occupations and protection under his stern justice.
~ from With Fire and Sword, by Henryk Sienkiewicz, translated by W.S. Kuniczak
Related content
Comments: 80
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
👍: 1 ⏩: 0
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
👍: 1 ⏩: 1
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Simply majestic. I found this in someone's faves!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Why thank you! I'm so happy you like it!
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Nice work! The details and his armor are very well done.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Maybe at some point, but not at this point of my life. I'm swamped with things that I have to get done. 
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
It's a very impressive and accurate portrait(according to the description of the novel) of Prince Yeremi,very well done!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thank you! Glad you like it!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
The novel "With Fire and Sword" is my all time favorite,and I am very glad to see someone drawing portraits for the characters!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
It's one of my favorites too!
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Very dramatic and imposing. I like how he's sort of gazing out into the distance.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thank you!!! Yes, he has very lofty ideals, so I tried to convey that a bit with his posture.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I got what you were saying. 
When did you read With Fire and Sword?
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Oh, it was years ago. In Englsh translation. Then I read The Deluge, in which the protagonist's name is translated as "Kmita", the Banneret of Orsha (instead of Kmicic).
I have not read Pan Michael, so don't spoil the ending by telling me how the Siege of Vienna turns out! 
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I haven't read that one yet either, haha.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Eh? Mercy is only possible to the victorious; who are the defeated even showing mercy to?
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I think you misunderstand the grammatical meaning of the preposition "to". I did not write that "Mercy is possible only from the defeated."
The quote comes from author Henryk Sienkiewicz in his novel Ogiem i Mieczem, who puts the saying in the mouth of his Prince Jarema.
The point is that the victorious cannot show mercy to someone who has not yet been defeated.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Then the English translation was wrong. Because in English, "X is only possible to Y" means, and only means, that Y alone can engage in X. The only correct translation is "One can only show mercy to the defeated."
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Generally, I disagree with the sweeping claim that you make involving "means and only means", etc. The statement as uttered by the semi-fictional character Jarema is not intended to be an instantiation of a formula from modal logic. I did not invent the sentence "Mercy is possible only to the defeated", but I had no trouble understanding who might be showing mercy to whom, and the necessary precondition for showing mercy: the recipient of mercy must be someone who has been defeated and not still capable of military resistance.
Notice that you swap the order of "only" and "possible" in your analysis. So even if I were to accept your conclusion as to the meaning of "X is only possible to Y", I am not necessarily obligated by rationality to accept that it holds also for "X is possible only to Y". One must allow for the possibility here that a fallacy of shifting sense is occurring.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
Modal logic? I'm talking linguistics. In Indo-European languages statements of the form "X is only possible to Y" are equivalent to "only Y can do/have X". They can have no other meaning, considered as utterances in natural language, not "modal logic". That you understood the mistranslated phrase from the context is all well and good, but that doesn't make it the correct translation. Because it simply isn't; the agent of the implied action "to be merciful" in that phrase, is "the defeated". Period—language is conventional, but it is not subjective.
Do you know how we determine the agency, implicit or explicit, of a verb, in linguistics? It's very important in ergative languages, for instance, since in those the agents of intransitive verbs are in the same case (the absolutive) as the patients of transitive ones, while the agents of transitive verbs are in a different case, the ergative (which gives that syntactic alignment its name).
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Another point I just noticed. You wrote, "The only correct translation is 'One can only show mercy to the defeated'".
As written, this is incorrect. The placement of "only" here implies that one has no choice, that the only thing one can do to the defeated is show mercy to them. The sentence that you should have written to make your point is "One can show mercy only to the defeated." You would then have to argue that "Mercy is possible" cannot be substituted for "One can show mercy".
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Actually no, the "only" could mean either that "the only thing one can do is to show mercy to the defeated", but it is much more typical for it to mean, as I meant it, "the only people to whom mercy can be shown are the defeated". Would you like the lecture on corpus linguistics? I think a statistical analysis of any corpus of any language, at least Indo-European ones, will show the latter to be more typically what the "only" implies. Actually almost any language, granting of course that "can" works very differently in languages like Japanese and Korean, to say nothing of Navajo.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Let's see if we can't cut through this argument to simplify the linguistic issues here. I deny that one has to indulge in comparative linguistics before understanding what is to me a very straightforward utterance. I cannot tell if English is your native language, but if it is not, don't feel bad. The correct use of, and meaning of, English prepositions is a source of difficulty for many non-native English speakers.
Consider the following two sentences, as nearly alike as I can make them, except for the preposition involved.
(1). Mercy is possible only to the defeated.
(2). Mercy is possible only from the defeated.
If I understand your initial objection to the phraseology, you interpret sentence 1. to mean what I would mean by sentence 2. Now, typically in English, "to" and "from" are exactly opposite in meaning. So, by your contention, two diametrically opposed propositions substituted for each other in the same sentence give rise to exactly the same meaning of that sentence. I find this not only to be wrong, but illogical.
👍: 0 ⏩: 2
I am very glad you are interested in polish literature .
I have found that sentence in the original and I think the context is very important.
"Zwyciężonym łaskę okażcie, to ją przyjmą z wdzięcznością i pamiętać będą; u zwycięzców w pogardę tylko pójdziecie. Bogdaj temu ludowi nikt nigdy krzywd nie był czynił! Ale gdy raz bunt rozgorzał, tedy nie układami, ale krwią gasić go trzeba. Inaczej hańba i zguba nam!"
(volume 1)
"Tu znów przychodziły wojewodzie na myśl słowa Jeremiego: „Łaski można dać tylko zwyciężonym” — i znów myśl jego zasuwała się w ciemność, a pod nogami otwierała się przepaść."
(volume 2)
Prince Jarema wanted to say: "Show your mercy to victims, not to winners. The victims will be greatful to you, but the winners will despise you."
He wants to fight Cossacs, not to conduct negotiations.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
Actually I was wondering if English might not be your second language, since you are asserting implications to English phrases that they do not and almost cannot have, failing to comprehend that "possible to" is an idiomatic phrase, and asserting the existence of a "mercy from" construction that essentially does not exist.
I cannot conceive of any native English speaker, not if he is remotely acquainted with English as it is normally used, using your example 2. That's just not how we talk. Again: corpus linguistics. That's where you statistically analyze a body of either written or spoken (either transcribed or actually audio-recorded) communication within a language (usually restricted to a particular variety, e.g. American English, or even, say, South Boston dialect), and attempt to determine how particular phrases are used in that body, by analyzing each occurrence in its context and how it is used in them (in South Boston dialect, for instance, they use "wicked" as an adverb to intensify adjectives). Can you please tell me one instance of anyone saying "mercy from"? I can't actually think of one time I've ever heard or read that phrase, at least not without the word "receive" being there. Normally one is "shown mercy by" someone.
Can you please point me to one native writer of English who uses the phrase as in your example 1? I ask because I cannot ever once since I learned to read at the age of four remember ever seeing someone use the phrase you're using it, rather than as the idiomatic construction "possible to".
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
I am very glad you are interested in polish literature
I have found that sentence in the original and I think the context is very important.
"Zwyciężonym łaskę okażcie, to ją przyjmą z wdzięcznością i pamiętać będą; u zwycięzców w pogardę tylko pójdziecie. Bogdaj temu ludowi nikt nigdy krzywd nie był czynił! Ale gdy raz bunt rozgorzał, tedy nie układami, ale krwią gasić go trzeba. Inaczej hańba i zguba nam!"
(volume 1)
"Tu znów przychodziły wojewodzie na myśl słowa Jeremiego: „Łaski można dać tylko zwyciężonym” — i znów myśl jego zasuwała się w ciemność, a pod nogami otwierała się przepaść."
(volume 2)
Prince Jarema wanted to say: "Show your mercy to victims, not to winners. The victims will be greatful to you, but the winners will despise you."
He wants to fight Cossacs, not to conduct negotiations.
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
This is beautiful; maybe you could help me with my book I'm doing. I've been looking for an artist
👍: 0 ⏩: 1
Thank you!
Unfortunately, right now I'm swamped with commissions and projects alongside of schoolwork so i don't have time for any new things.
👍: 0 ⏩: 0
| Next =>