| Crimean Sonnets | |
| Title Orig: | Sonety |
| Border: | yes |
| Author: | Adam Mickiewicz |
| Country: | Russian Empire |
| Language: | Polish |
| Genre: | poetry |
| Release Date: | 1826 |
| English Release Date: | 1917 |
The Crimean Sonnets (Sonety krymskie) are a series of 18 Polish sonnets by Adam Mickiewicz, constituting an artistic telling of a journey through the Crimea. They were published in 1826, together with a cycle of love poems called "The Odesan Sonnets" (Sonety Odeskie), in a collection called "Sonnets" (Sonety).
The Crimean Sonnets is an expression of Mickiewicz's interest in the Orient, shared by many of the students of the University of Vilnius. Involuntarily residing in Russia, Mickiewicz left Odesa and went on a journey, which turned out to be a trek to another world, his first initiation into "the East".[1] The Crimean Sonnets are romantic descriptions of oriental nature and culture of the East which show the despair of the poet—a pilgrim, an exile longing for the homeland, driven from his home by a violent enemy.[2]
The Crimean Sonnets is considered the first sonnet cycle in Polish literature and a significant example of early romanticism in Poland, which gave rise to the huge popularity of this genre in Poland and inspired many Polish poets of the Romantic era as well as the Young Poland period.[3]
The Crimean Sonnets were published in an English translation by Edna Worthley Underwood in 1917. A classic Russian rendition of one of the sonnets belongs to Mikhail Lermontov. In 2021, an English translation by Kevin Kearney was published in Cardinal Points, Volume 11: this particular rendition remains faithful to the Petrarchan sonnet form and emulates the thirteen syllable line of the Polish originals by using the twelve syllable English hexameter line.