If—

"If" is a poem written in 1895 by Rudyard Kipling and first published in the Brother Square Toes chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems. Like William Ernest Henley's Invictus, it is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" that popular culture has made into a traditional British virtue. Its status is confirmed both by the number of parodies it has inspired, and by the widespread popularity it still draws amongst Britons (it was voted Britain's favorite poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll).

According to Kipling in his autobiography Something of Myself, posthumously published in 1937, the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa, subsequently called the Jameson Raid. This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Second Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.

Reaction to the poem

Kipling himself noted in Something of Myself that the poem had been "printed as cards to hang up in offices and bedrooms; illuminated text-wise and anthologised to weariness".

T. S. Eliot in his essays on Kipling's work describes Kipling's verse as "great verse" that sometimes unintentionally changes into poetry. George Orwell—an ambivalent admirer of Kipling's work who hated the poet's politics—compared people who only knew "If—" "and some of his more sententious poems", to Colonel Blimp.

Translation

"If—" has been translated into many languages. In 1937 Kipling mentions "seven-and-twenty tongues". One worthy of note is a translation into Burmese language, the mother tongue of the country where the city of another of Kipling's masterpiece "Mandalay" is located. It was translated by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. Another Nobel laureate to translate "If" was Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić.

Some translations are:

• Në munç,into Albanian by Fan S. Noli
• A Kae Ywaet, into Burmese by Aung San Suu Kyi.
• Ako… into Serbian language by Ivo Andrić.
• Ha into Hungarian by Gábor Devecseri .
• Ha… into Hungarian by Kosztolányi Dezső.
• Hvis, into Norwegian by André Bjerke
• Indien, into Dutch by J.M. de Vries de Waal.
• Als, into Dutch by Karel Jonckheere.
• Když, into Czech by Otokar Fischer
• Keď into Slovak by Ľubomír Feldek.
• Se, into Italian by Dario Fonti.
• Si, into French by André Maurois in 1918.
• Si..., into Latin by unknown
• Tu seras un homme, mon fils, into French by Jules Castier in 1949.
• Заповедь, into Russian by M. Lozinsky.
• Se, into Portuguese by Guilherme de Almeida.
• Ja, into Latvian by unknown.
• Eğer, into Turkish by Bülent Ecevit.

References

External links

• Free Human-read audio recording of "If—" at Librivox