This essay explores the role of The Glove a translation of Friedrich Schiller's 1797 narrative poem "Der Handschuh", within Adam Mickiewicz's Ballads and Romances (Ballady i romanse, 1822). Critics have shown various functions of The Glove, including a compositional one and a polemical one directed against the literature of Polish sentimentalism. What remains a blind spot, however, is the salient laconism of Schiller's ballad, which Mickiewicz's translation, despite some variations, renders very
carefully. This essay argues that such a poetics of brevi ty corresponds with the acute gesturality of the ballad. By rewriting a poem in 1820 that enacts the crisis of the medieval "civilization of gesture" (Jacques Le Goff) - the historical setting being sixteen-century France - Mickiewicz presents Romanticism as a space of artistic and social openness: Like the protagonist, the knight Emrod (Delorges, in Schiller's original), who at the end throws the lady's glove in her face and disappears forever from the court, Mickiewicz polemically refers to a symbolic order and at the same time negotiates it anew. The significance of gesture as "pure deed" (Goethe on Schiller's The Glove) for the emergence of the Romantic ethos of the deed (czyn) in Poland, this essay concludes, has not been conclusively explored even two hundred years after the publication of Ballads and Romances.