Karl Dedecius

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Karl Dedecius (2006)

Karl Dedecius (born May 20, 1921 in Łódź ; † February 26, 2016 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German writer and translator of Polish , Russian and Serbian literature.

Life

Karl Dedecius was born as the son of German parents in the then multi-ethnic city of Łódź, which at that time had recently been part of a Polish state again . He attended the Polish Stefan-Żeromski -Gymnasium and graduated from high school there . After the German invasion of Poland in World War II , he was first drafted into the Reich Labor Service and then into the Wehrmacht . He was badly wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad and was taken prisoner by the Soviets . During this time he taught himself Russian :

“I was in the sickroom and the nurses brought me books, von Lermontow, for example. For a year I learned the Cyrillic script and the Russian language from Lermontov and Pushkin . The guards then asked me to write love letters for them because I wrote like Pushkin. "

Richard von Weizsäcker congratulates Karl Dedecius on the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 1990

In 1950 Dedecius was released and first went to his fiancée in Weimar in the GDR . In 1952 he fled to the Federal Republic . Dedecius became an employee at Allianz AG . In his free time he occupied himself with Polish culture and literary translations, and also maintained private contacts with Polish writers. Dedecius on this:

"Only when I had settled in that way and achieved a certain stability in life, could I finally begin to deal with literature, persistently and systematically, although my job, incidentally, had nothing to do with writing."

In the introduction to the Polish edition of Translating , Jerzy Kwiatkowski wrote: “From a formal point of view, one could say that this great translation work was created after work, as a result of a hobby”.

In 1959 he published his first anthology, Lesson of Silence . In the following years he translated such well-known Polish writers as Zbigniew Herbert , Stanisław Jerzy Lec , Czesław Miłosz , Tadeusz Różewicz and Wisława Szymborska "after work" . He also published his own essays on literature and translation technology. Since 1967 he was a member of the PEN Center Germany .

1979/1980 he initiated the German Poland Institute in Darmstadt , whose director he remained until the end of 1997, where he continued his literary activity. Dedecius' main work, in addition to the 50-volume Polish Library , a canon that was published by Suhrkamp Verlag from 1982 to 2000 , is the seven-volume Panorama of 20th Century Polish Literature (1996-2000), the final volume of which is also a kind of autobiography.

In 2001 he handed over his personal archive, including correspondence with Polish writers such as Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz, to the Karl Dedecius Archive of the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) .

Honors

Dedecius was the holder of several honorary doctorates as well as numerous prizes and awards:

Richard von Weizsäcker paid tribute to Karl Dedecius in his memoirs: "He, who is unparalleled in his rank as a post-poet and translator, has created an almost complete library of rich Polish literature in German for us."

Works

  • 1971: Germans and Poles. Message of the books. Hanser, Munich, ISBN 3-446-11481-5 .
  • 1974: Poland is everywhere. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-36695-5 .
  • 1975: Polish profiles. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-02570-8 .
  • 1981: On the literature and culture of Poland. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-02571-6 .
  • as editor 1981: Polish punch lines, satires and short prose of the 20th century. Ullstein-Taschenbuch 20215, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna, ISBN 3-548-20125-3 .
    • Other editions: Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1962 and edition expanded by the publisher: dtv 465, Munich 1968, OCLC 633033070
  • 1986: About translating. Theory and practice. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-37758-2 .
  • 1988: From Poland's Poets. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-37979-8 .
  • 1990: curriculum vitae from books and pages. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-40309-5 .
  • 1996: East West Bazaar. Speeches, Essays, Appreciations. With a foreword by Marion Countess Dönhoff . Selected and with an afterword by Andreas Lawaty. Ammann, Zurich, ISBN 3-250-10283-0 .
  • 2000: Panorama of 20th Century Polish Literature. Dept. V. Panorama. A panorama. Ammann, Zurich, ISBN 3-250-50005-4 .
  • 2002: The Art of Translation. Logos, Berlin, ISBN 3-8325-0000-6 .
  • 2006: A European from Lodz: memories. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main, ISBN 3-518-41756-8 .
  • 2011: My Polish library. With a foreword by Stefanie Peter. Insel, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-458-17499-8 .

literature

  • Elvira Grözinger, Andreas Lawaty (ed.): Looking for the opinion: Karl Dedecius, the translator and mediator for his 65th birthday. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1986, ISBN 3-447-02630-8 .
  • Winfried Lipscher (translator): Awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities of the Catholic University of Lublin to Karl Dedecius on May 14, 1987. Catholic University of Lublin 1987.
  • Manfred Mack (Ed.): Karl Dedecius and the German Poland Institute. Laudations, reports, interviews, poems. Justus von Liebig Verlag, Darmstadt 1991, ISBN 3-87390-098-X .
  • Hubert Orłowski : Karl Dedecius . In: Marek Zybura (Ed.): … Nie będzie nigdy Niemiec Polakowi bratem…? (= Bibliotek Odra ). Okis, Wrocław 1995, ISBN 83-904842-0-X , pp. 268-279.
  • Krzysztof A. Kuczyński: Karl Dedecius ambasador culture polskiej w Niemczech. UŁ, Lódź 2000, ISBN 83-7171-373-8 (Polish).
  • Przemysław Chojnowski: On the strategy and poetics of translation: an examination of the anthologies on Polish poetry by Karl Dedecius. Frank & Timme, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86596-013-8 (Dissertation University of Frankfurt an der Oder 2004, 298 pages).
  • Piotr Sulikowski: Neologism in Polish poetry: a translational analysis: discussed on the basis of examples from the translation work of Karl Dedecius (= series of writings on comparative linguistics , volume 1). Kovač, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8300-3223-6 .
  • Paweł Bąk: The metaphor in translation. Studies on the transfer of the aphorisms by Stanisław Jerzy Lec and the poems by Wisława Szymborska (= Danzig Contributions to German Studies , Volume 20). Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 3-631-55757-4 .
  • Błażej Kaźmierczak: Dzieła Karla Dedeciusa wybór bibliograficzny adnotowany = Works by Karl Dedecius: annotated selection bibliography (= Scripta Caroli Dedecii , Volume 1). Atut, Wrocław and Neiße-Verlag, Dresden 2009, ISBN 978-83-7432-530-1 (Polish and German).

Web links

Commons : Karl Dedecius  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl Dedecius obituary notice , FAZ , March 2, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b Karl Dedecius ( Memento from May 23, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ On the political motives of the flight, see Przemysław Chojnowski: On the strategy and poetics of translation: an examination of the anthologies of Polish poetry by Karl Dedecius (lit.), p. 48.
  4. ↑ https://www.literaturportal-bayern.de/autorinnen-autoren?task=lpbauthor.default&pnd=118810863 .
  5. ↑ http://www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/sixcms/media.php/1290/1990_dedecius.pdf .
  6. ↑ https://www.literaturportal-bayern.de/autorinnen-autoren?task=lpbauthor.default&pnd=118810863 .
  7. ↑ gim43.scholaris.pl ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gim43.scholaris.pl
  8. ↑ German-Polish “bridge builders” are honored . (PDF, 85 kB) Press release from the German National Foundation .
  9. ↑ Richard von Weizsäcker: Four times. Memories. Siedler, Berlin 1997, p. 372.


personal data
SURNAME Dedecius, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author and translator of Polish and Russian literature
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 2016
Place of death Frankfurt am Main