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My first meeting with Czesław Miłosz

RELATED STORIES

Learning French
Julia Hartwig Poet
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And then came the war which obviously changed everything. We had a sense of dread, of political injustice connected with international relations. Nevertheless, somehow... we survived. I spent most of this time reading and I became very familiar with... well, relatively familiar with French literature. I read all of the translations by Boy, Balzac and everything else that today I wouldn't be able to do – perhaps a few selected stories. And I also started to learn French because at school, I was learning German and I was taking my matriculation exams in German. And this was a little... when anyone found out that I was learning French, they were a bit surprised because people were learning English. They were learning English because they were expecting that the western armies, not the French, would come, and then there'd be a need for this language and we would live a long and happy life after that. Unfortunately, this didn't happen but I benefitted because I'd learned a language, perhaps not quite perfectly, but I made up for this during my subsequent stay in France.

No potem nastąpiła wojna, wojna oczywiście wszystko zmieniła. Przebywaliśmy ją w takim poczuciu zgrozy, niesprawiedliwości politycznej związanej z... z układami między... międzypaństwowymi. No, ale jakoś... jakoś żyliśmy. W tym okresie ja właściwie poświęciłam się głównie lekturom i w tym czasie właściwie poznałam dobrze... no, dobrze – w miarę dobrze literaturę francuską. Przeczytałam całą bibliotekę przekładów z biblioteki Boya, Balzaka, to wszystko co nas dzisiaj już nie byłoby mnie stać, może kilka wybranych powieści. I także zaczęłam się uczyć francuskiego, ponieważ w szkole uczyłam się niemieckiego i zdawałam maturę z niemieckiego. I to było takie troszeczkę, jak ktoś się dowiedział, że ja uczę się francuskiego to się dziwił, bo ludzie uczyli się angielskiego. Uczyli się angielskiego również dlatego, że spodziewali się, że nie tyle od Francji ile właśnie to przyjdzie wojsko zachodnie, będzie ten język także potrzebny i będziemy żyli długo i szczęśliwie w tym związku. Niestety, to się nie spełniło, ale moja korzyść była taka, że nauczyłam się języka, może niedostatecznie jeszcze, ale potem pobyt mój we Francji trochę to uzupełnił.

Born to a Polish father and a Russian mother, Julia Hartwig (1921-2017) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and author of children's books. She studied at the University of Warsaw, the Catholic University in Lublin and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Czesław Miłosz called her 'the grande dame of Polish poetry'. Julia Hartwig was one of the few poets in Poland who made masterly use of poetic prose. She translated poems by Apollinaire, Rimbaud, Max Jacob, Cendrars and Supervielle, and published monographs on Apollinaire and Gerard de Nerval. She also translated from English, and published a large anthology of American poetry which she co-edited in 1992 with her late husband, the poet Artur Międzyrzecki.

Listeners: Andrzej Wolski

Film director and documentary maker, Andrzej Wolski has made around 40 films since 1982 for French television, the BBC, TVP and other TV networks. He specializes in portraits and in historical films. Films that he has directed or written the screenplay for include Kultura, which he co-directed with Agnieszka Holland, and KOR which presents the history of the Worker’s Defence Committee as told by its members. Andrzej Wolski has received many awards for his work, including the UNESCO Grand Prix at the Festival du Film d’Art.

Tags: World War II, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, Honore de Balzac

Duration: 1 minute, 26 seconds

Date story recorded: June 2010

Date story went live: 10 May 2011