The first region was called the Plain of Life, the second the Plain of Death. The supreme and all mighty Brahma had created both plains and had commanded the good Vishnu to rule in the Region of Life, while the wise Siva was lord in the Region of Death. "Do what ye understand to be best," said Brahma to the two rulers. Hence in the region belonging to Vishnu life moved with all its activity. The sun rose and set; day followed night, and night followed day; the sea rose and fell; in the sky appeared clouds big with rain; the earth was soon covered with forests and crowded with beasts, birds and people. So that all living creatures might increase greatly and multiply, the kindly god created Love, which he made to be Happiness also. After this Brahma summoned Vishnu and said to him: "Thou canst produce nothing better on earth, and since heaven is created already by me, do thou rest and let those whom thou callest people weave the thread of life for themselves unassisted."

Author Biography

Henryk Adam Aleksander Pius Sienkiewicz (1846 - 1916) was a Polish journalist, novelist and the Nobel Prize laureate. He is best remembered for his historical novels, especially for his internationally known best-seller Quo Vadis (1896). Born into an impoverished Polish noble family in Russian-ruled Congress Poland, in the late 1860s Sienkiewicz began publishing journalistic and literary pieces. In the late 1870s he traveled to the United States, sending back travel essays that won him popularity with Polish readers. In the 1880s he began serializing novels that further increased his popularity. He soon became one of the most popular Polish writers at the turn of the 20th century and numerous translations gained him international renown, culminating in his receipt of the 1905 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "outstanding merits as an epic writer." Jeremiah Curtin (6 September 1835 - 14 December 1906) was an American translator and folklorist. 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.