Jeremiah Curtin

Jeremiah Curtin (6 September 1835 – 14 December 1906) was an American translator and folklorist.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Curtin spent his early life in what is now, Greendale, Wisconsin and later graduated from Harvard College in 1863. In 1864 he went to Russia, where he worked for the U.S. legation and as a translator. He left Russia in 1877, stayed a year in London, and returned to the United States, where he worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology.

His specialties were his work with American Indian languages and Slavic languages.

In addition to publishing collections of fairy tales and folklore and writings about his travels, Curtin translated a number of volumes by Henryk Sienkiewicz, including his Trilogy set in the 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a couple of volumes on contemporary Poland, and, most famously and profitably, Quo Vadis (1897). He also published an English version of Bolesław Prus' only historical novel, Pharaoh, under the title The Pharaoh and the Priest (1902).

According to the epitaph placed over Curtin's grave in Bristol, Vermont, by his erstwhile employer, the Smithsonian Institution, and written by his friend Theodore Roosevelt, Polish was but one of seventy (sic!) languages that "Jeremiah Curtin [in his] travel[s] over the wide world... learn[ed] to speak." Curtin apparently knew little or no Polish before he began translating Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novel With Fire and Sword in 1888 at age fifty. 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 [...]" and set the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, on its feet. Sienkiewicz himself appears to have been short-changed in his part of the profits from the translation of the best-selling Quo Vadis.

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