Kurt Kelm

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Kurt Kelm (born December 1, 1925 in Łódź , † December 16, 2009 in Oranienburg ) was a German translator . Kelm received numerous awards for his translations of Polish authors of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Life

Kelm, who was born in 1925 to German parents in Łódź, grew up bilingually. In 1944 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and in 1945 he was taken prisoner by the French . From 1945 he attended a grammar school for former Polish citizens in La Courtine , which had been established by the Polish government in exile . There he passed the Abitur in 1947. At the end of this year he moved to Naumburg (Saale) with his future wife Ludmilla, whom he had met during school .

After various temporary jobs, he started working as a freelance translator.

In 1954 Kelm visited Polish publishers during a two-month study visit. He then worked as a publishing editor for Volk und Welt , for the military publishing house and from 1972 again as a freelance translator. In the meantime he also worked as a teacher for a few years. From 1969 to 1972 he studied Polish studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin . In 1965, 1970, 1975, 1979 and 1987 he took part in translation congresses in Poland. From 1957 he was a member of the Writers' Association of the GDR and from 1979 of the Societas Jablonoviana .

Kelm, who had lived in Oranienburg and the surrounding area since 1949, died in 2009 of complications from Parkinson's disease.

Awards

Translations

Kurt Kelm has translated more than 60 books of various genres, including around 20 books for children and young people.

prose

Pieces

Translations into anthologies

  • Antoni Marianowicz; Ryszard Marek Groński (Ed.): Puzzle Games - Polish Aphorisms of the 20th Century . Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1973
  • Jutta Janke; Hubert Schumann (Ed.): Neighbors. Texts from Poland . Volk und Welt Verlag, Berlin 1985. Translation of the texts by Jerzy Pachlowski , Ludwik Flaszen , Jan Józef Szczepański and Władysław Tatarkiewicz
  • Gyula Kurucz (ed.): Blinding years for dogs . edition q, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-86124-174-9 . Translation of the novel Walks with a Dead Girl by Tadeusz Konwicki

Editions

  • The Oder flows in the west. Modern prose about the Polish western territories . Selection and epilogue by Kurt Kelm. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1971

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Heinz Kneip; Hubert Orłowski (Hrsg.): The reception of Polish literature in the German-speaking area and that of German-speaking literature in Poland 1945–1985 . 2nd edition. Deutsches Polen-Institut Darmstadt 1989 (1988), p. 541 f.
  2. Polish Wikipedia article: pl: Odznaka honorowa Zasłużony dla Kultury Polskiej