The present paper attempts to capture the dominant identity features in the epic poem Pan Tadeusz and the way they are conveyed in some Lithuanian and French translations. Based on collocations and quantitative data, the analysis of the original text reveals the prevalence of the wild Edenic Lithuania, the poet’s motherland, as the theatre of events where the chivalrous Poles are the main heroes: it confirms that this work by Mickiewicz is a prominent source of the romantic myth about Lithuanian. As for the Lithuanian translation, the most obvious characteristic is the shift of the concept of Poland: while Polska ‘Poland’ designates primarily the whole Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the original text, its Lithuanian equivalent Lenkija refers mainly to the sole kingdom of Poland in the translation, as a consequence of the many generalizations and metonymic substitutions. In the French translation of Noire-Isle, on the contrary, the Polish element appears to be strengthened. Thus, both translations in verse distort significantly the original text as far as identity is concerned.

This paper examines brief narrative and expository texts, also a poem, written by Miłosz, in which Lithuania receives explicit mention. Passages from the fictional autobiography Les Zborowski are seen as the building blocks of later representations of Lithuania; they evoke landscapes seen through the mind’s eye that convey a sense of a near mythic land recalled through memory. Some of the descriptive fragments of Les Zborowski recur in a lecture delivered by Miłosz on March 29, 1919, in Paris. They are brought together into a lyrical coda that invites the reader to imagine a distant land and at the same time, going beyond the surface of poetic language, suggests a dual vision of Lithuania as that palpable reality, both ancient and a newly born state, which best expresses life’s rhythms of decline and resurrection. Three months later, Miłosz delivered a second lecture on Lithuania. The lecture is noteworthy because of a brief account of the author’s near visionary experience when, walking the streets of Kaunas and seeing signs of both poverty and enthusiasm, he reads the scene as comparable to the resurrection of the biblical Lazarus. “La Berline arretée dans la nuit”, a poem, evokes the return to an ancestral home while at the same time pointing to an elsewhere beyond the known. For Miłosz, Lithuania was a native land, a trace of myth and a political entity, also a bit of the real that made poetic and visionary language possible.