Aniela Zagórska was a Polishtranslator who rendered into Polish nearly all the works of Joseph Conrad. , 1914 . Aniela translated Conrad into Polish. '', vol. 1 of 2, with foreword by Stefan Żeromski,1933. Click on the image to open the book.
Life
Aniela Zagórska was a niece of Joseph Conrad. In 1923–39 she translated nearly all of Conrad's works into Polish. In 1929, for these translations, she received a Polish PEN Club award. When in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I Conrad had returned to his native Poland for the first time since departing it, he had taken refuge with his family in the southern-mountain resort town of Zakopane. A few days after arrival there, they had moved to the Konstantynówka pensionoperated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska, the namesake mother ofthe future translator; the pension had earlier been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianistArtur Rubinstein. The elder Zagórska had introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologistBronisław Malinowski. Conrad roused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, the doubleNobel laureate Maria Skłodowska-Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, scolded him for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land But thirty-two-year-old Aniela Zagórska, Conrad's niece who would translate his works into Polish in 1923–39, idolized him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus, read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising – "my beloved Prus" – that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him "better than Dickens" – a favorite English novelist of Conrad's. Translation, like other arts, inescapably involves choice, and choice implies interpretation. Conrad, whose writings have been described as verging on "auto-translation" from his Polish and French linguistic personae, would later advise his niece and Polish translator Aniela Zagórska:
