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Jeremiah Curtin (6 September 1835 – 14 December 1906) was an American ethnographer, folklorist, and translator. Curtin had an abiding interest in languages and was conversant with several. From 1883 to 1891 he was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology as a field researcher documenting the customs and mythologies of various Native American tribes. He and his wife, Alma Cardell Curtin, traveled extensively, collecting ethnological information, from the Modocs of the Pacific Northwest to the Buryats of Siberia. They made several trips to Ireland, visited the Aran Islands, and, with the aid of interpreters, collected folklore in southwest Munster and other Gaelic-speaking regions. Curtin compiled one of the first accurate collections of Irish folk material, and was an important source for W. B. Yeats. Curtin is known for several collections of Irish folktales. He also translated into English Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and other novels and stories by the Pole. Life Born in Detroit, Michigan, to Irish parents, Curtin spent his early life on the family farm in what is now Greendale, Wisconsin and later attended Harvard College, despite his parents preference that he go to a Catholic college. While there he studied under folklorist Francis James Child. Curtin graduated from Harvard in 1863. Curtin then moved to New York where he read law, and worked for the U.S. Sanitary Commission while translating and teaching German.In 1864 he went to Russia, where he served as secretary to Cassius M. Clay, Minister to the Russian court. During his time in Russia, Curtin became friends with Konstantin Pobedonostsev, professor of law at Moscow State University. He also visited Czechoslovakia and the Caucasus, and studied Slavic languages. While continuing to improve his Russian language skills, he also studied Czech, Polish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Hungarian, and Turkish. Curtin returned to the United States in 1868 for a brief visit. Clay assumed that around this time Curtin made some comments to William H. Seward that cost Clay an appointment as Secretary of War. Clay referred to Curtin as a "Jesuit Irishman".Upon his return to the United States, Curtin lectured on Russia and the Caucasus. In 1872 he married Alma M. Cardell. Mrs. Cardell acted as his secretary. In 1883 Curtin was employed by the Bureau of American Ethnology as a field worker. His specialties were his work with American Indian languages and Slavic languages. In 1900, Curtin travelled to Siberia, which resulted in the book A Journey in Southern Siberia (published posthumously). The first part of the book is a travelogue; the last two-thirds is a record of the mythology of the Buryat people, including a prose summary of Gesar as performed by Manshuud Emegeev. In 1905, he was asked by President Theodore Roosevelt to serve at the peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Jeremiah Curtin died December 14, 1906, in Burlington Vermont and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Bristol.His grandson Harry Sylvester, an American Catholic author, was born in 1908. Irish folklore Curtin visited Ireland on five occasions between 1871 and 1893, where he collected folkloric material in southwest Munster, the Aran Islands, and other Irish language regions with the help of interpreters. From this work he produced Myths and Folklore of Ireland (1890), an important source for folk material used by Yeats; Hero Tales of Ireland (1894); and Tales of the Fairies and Ghost World (1895). He also published a series of articles in The New York Sun, later edited and republished as Irish Folk Tales by Séamus Ó Duilearga in 1944. Translations from Polish 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 languages that "Jeremiah Curtin [in his] travel[s] over the wide world ... learn[ed] to speak".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). In 1900 Curtin translated The Teutonic Knights by Sienkiewicz, the author's major historic novel about the Battle of Grunwald and its background. He also published an English version of Bolesław Prus' only historical novel, Pharaoh, under the title The Pharaoh and the Priest (1902). Having both Polish and Russian interests, Curtin scrupulously avoided publicly favoring either people in their historic neighbors' quarrels (particularly since the Russian Empire had been in occupation of a third of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, including Warsaw, since the latter part of the 18th century). Sienkiewicz Curtin 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. In 1897, Curtin's first meeting with Sienkiewicz, like his earlier first contact with the latter's writings, came about by sheer chance, in a hotel dining room at the Swiss resort of Ragatz. For the next nine years, until Curtin's death in 1906, the two men would be in continual contact through correspondence and personal meetings. Harold B. Segel writes about Curtin's translations of works by Henryk Sienkiewicz: ... Curtin was an indefatigable, diligent, and reasonably accurate translator, but he lacked any real feeling for language. Despite occasional lapses, the translations are acceptably faithful to the original, yet much of the time they are stilted and pedestrian. This results, at times, as the American translator Nathan Haskell Dole had remarked [in 1895], from the location of the adverb in final position (even when this is not the Polish word order).... The "inelasticity" [that the Briton, Sir Edmund William Gosse spoke of [in 1897] is perhaps nowhere so clearly evident in Curtin's translations as in his insistence on rendering koniecznie as "absolutely" in all circumstances. The "odd foreign tone" mentioned by Dole can most often be attributed to Curtin's too literal translation and inept handling of idioms.... The [London] Athenaeum review of [Sienkiewicz]'s Children of the Soil [i.e., Rodzina Połanieckich—The Połaniecki Family] in 1896 suggested, furthermore, that Curtin's use of "thou" and "thee" in the addresses of friends and relatives contributed to the stiffness of the tran.... Discover the Jeremiah Curtin popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jeremiah Curtin books.