Edward Balcerzan

1937

Edward Balcerzan (b. 1937 in Vovchansk, Ukraine) – a Polish translation scholar, critic, prose writer and poet. For his work in literary studies and translation, he received, among others, the Polish PEN Club award and the Jurzykowski Prize of New York. He was one of the founders of the Poznań school of translation and until his retirement in 2008, he acted as Head of the Research Centre for Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary Theory and Translation at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań. His studies on literary translation as a specific form of art with its own distinctive poetics have appeared in many languages including Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Serbian. Balcerzan was born in Ukraine and moved to Poland in 1946 at the age of 9. His subsequent Polish-Russian bilingualism found an academic continuation in his scholarship on literary bilingualism, in particular his work on the Polish-Russian bilingual writing of the futurist poet Bruno Jasieński (published in 1968). His later books on literary translation included: Literatura z literature (strategie tłumaczy) [Literature from Literature: The Translators’ Strategies] (collected and edited in 1998), Tłumaczenie jako wojna światów: Między translatologią a komparatystyką [Translation as a War of the Worlds: Between Translation Studies and Comparative Literature] (2009) as well as an edited anthology of compiled reflections and excerpts from essays on the art of translation by Polish writers throughout history (from 1440 to 1974) Pisarze polscy o sztuce przekładu [Polish Writers on the Art of Translation] (1977, later updated and co-edited with Ewa Rajewska, 2007). In addition to his numerous academic works on literary translation, Balcerzan has published fives books of poetry of his own as well as translations of Russian futurists, Gennadiy Aygi and Boris Pasternak.