A poem labelled dubiously as having been 'translated' by Oscar Wilde - from Polish, which he did not speak - is buried deep in an obscure anthology edited by Clement Scott, drama critic of the London Daily Telegraph. The poem, 'Sen Artysty', supposedly written by actress Helena Modjeska and translated by Wilde near the time of her London debut, is as conflicted as many other stories and poems in The Green Room (1880), the anthology of theatre-writing in which it appears. The actress, or rather the persona of the poem that Wilde associated with Helena Modjeska, regrets her choice of an artistic life, is left with 'a restless pain' in her heart, and receives the stigmata of 'red wounds of thorns' on her brow when he tries to take off the laurel-crown. 'Sen Artysty' not only harmonises with other writings in Clement Scott's anthology - all of them stories, essays or poems about the theatre - but asserts the same themes as many other Victorian assessments of women performers. Actresses were commonly thought to pay a terrible price for the public lives they led, including even the fortunate minority, like Modjeska, whose genius or hard work opened the way to riches and international fame. That price was figured in the rhetoric of suffering, illness and death, in lives wrecked by maladies both physical and mental. Victorian praise and even adulation of actresses was thus mingled with representations of them as suffering or wounded, like the speaker in the Helena Modjeska poem, or as monstrous, sick, or dying - victims of their own success in transcending the usual limits of a respectable Victorian woman's life.