Krystyna Berwińska

Krystyna Berwińska (1919–2016) was a theatre director, playwright and critic. She translated five Shakespeare plays. Three of them – Wesołe kumoszki z Windsoru (The Merry Wives of Windsor), Otello and Makbet – belong to the first wave of translations after the Second World War and appeared in the 1950s. She translated two more plays – Perykles (Pericles) and Król Ryszard II (Richard II) – after 1980.

She first developed an interest in Elizabethan drama as a student at the Łódź Film School. She also translated plays by lesser-known Elizabethan dramatists and on several occasions adapted existing translations of Shakespeare for the stage. From 1956 she worked with Teatr Ziemi Mazowieckiej (The Mazovian Theatre) in Warsaw and over the years she directed plays in, among other places, Łódź, Wrocław, Katowice and Opole. She was also the author of a novel, Con amore, which was made into a film in 1976 and translated into several languages. In 1966 she was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.

Unlike many of her contemporary translators, with backgrounds in linguistics, literary studies or poetry, Berwińska was at home in the theatre. She was an experienced director with a good knowledge of dramaturgy and even theatre management. She translated very much with productions in mind and always viewed the staging of a play as the key to reconstructing the meaning of the drama. For these reasons, she avoided archaic language and took care over the linguistic accuracy, concision and vigour of her dialogue. She disregarded the distinction between a literary translation and a translation for the stage and she never made alterations to the text through paraphrase or adaptation.

She worked on translations to meet the needs of particular productions. She also translated plays that she had staged earlier in her career using different translations.

The State Publishing Institute (PIW) published all of Berwińska’s translations. Two of them – Otello and Makbet – were reissued as part of a different series. These two plays are the ones that have been staged most often. Her Perykles and Ryszard II have not been performed.

Berwińska’s translations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (as Sen nocy letniej, performed in 1988) and Romeo and Juliet have not been published. There has been little literary-critical analysis of Berwińska’s work, but her translations have generally been well-received by theatre critics. She did not discuss her approach to translation, nor did she engage in debate with other translators.