Czesław Jastrzębiec Kozłowski

Czesław Jastrzębiec-Kozłowski (1894–1956) translated two of Shakespeare’s plays: Tymon Ateńczyk (Timon of Athens, 1954) and Burza (The Tempest, 1999), published posthumously. He attended secondary school in Kyiv. He continued his studies independently, turning his attention to philosophy and modern languages, among other things. He translated around seventy books from seven different languages, including the standard Polish translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Zbrodnia i kara, 1955) as well as works by Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. Translation was the main of source of income for Jastrzębiec-Kozłowski. Because of an accident during his childhood, he was a person with disabilities.

In his translation of The Tempest, Jastrzębiec-Kozłowski sought to bolster the comic parts, where he introduced colloquial expressions, insults and mockery. At the same time, he used modernist idiom in order to refresh the passages in verse, which some critics deemed to be anachronistic.

The final shape of Tymon Ateńczyk, however, was influenced by the editing, probably the work of Włodzimierz Lewik. The translation is stylistically uniform, entirely free from archaicisms and modernist poetics of Young Poland. A considerable portion of the translation is in prose, but unlike in other works no attempt is made to use the lower stylistic register to demarcate the social standing of a character.

The translation of The Tempest was staged in 1947 under the direction of Leon Schiller. The production was a tremendous success: it was part of the first post-war Shakespeare Festival at the Teatr Polski in Warsaw, where it won prizes for the direction, the scenography and two individual performances. The translation was only published fifty years later. Tymon Ateńczyk has only been staged once, in 1963. The text has not been reissued.