Władysław Zawistowski

Władysław Zawistowski (born 1954) is a poet, author, playwright, translator and impresario. In collaboration with Jerzy Limon he has translated two Shakespeare plays: Antoniusz i Kleopatra (1992) and Trojlus i Kressyda (1990). These projects, completed in the early 1990s, represent only a fraction of Zawistowski’s creative and organisational output.

He studied Polish at the University of Gdańsk. Between 1977 and 1991 he was literary director at the Wybrzeże Theatre in Gdańsk, where the first productions to use his co-translations took place. He has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, plays and three novels. In 2004 he was the recipient of the ‘Splendor Gedanensis’ prize for his contributions to culture, awarded by the City of Gdańsk.

Zawistowski and Limon’s translations are characterised by a strong coherence between the approach to translation and the specific concepts of particular productions. The decision to work collaboratively reflected the Elizabethan practice of multiple authorship, with different scenes written by specialist playwrights and then the question of continuity smoothed out on the stage. The division of labour between Zawistowski and Limon was not made explicit, but it can be inferred from their comments that Limon used his expertise on Shakespeare language to produce a first draft of the text.

Both translations were published for use in the theatre and then re-issued twice in a complete editorial version. In their second edition, the plays were made accessible online for free. Zawistowski and Limon were the first Polish translators of Shakespeare whose work was available in a digital format.

Reviews of the productions drew attention to the accessibility and power of the new translation. There was a new production of Antoniusz i Kleopatra in 2016, using the text as part of compilation with other translations.