Transstar Europa

3. 5. 2014

Małgorzata Łukasiewicz was born in 1948 in Warsaw. She works as a translator, literary critic, and essay writer. Since 1975 she has translated about seventy works, mostly fiction and philosophical titles. Thanks to her, Polish readers are familiar with works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jürgen Habermas, Patrick Süskind, W. G. Sebald, and Herman Hesse. She has been honored with numerous literary prizes (the Polish PEN-Club Prize, the Hermann Hesse Prize, and many more) and is regarded as the best Polish translator of the works of Robert Walser.

The first foreign language she acquired a good command of was French. However, she became interested in German authors while studying philosophy. A milestone in her translator career was her work on Georg Simmel’s Sociology.

In addition to the translations themselves, Łukasiewicz also writes about the authors and the process of transferring thoughts into another language. One such book that she wrote about Thomas Mann resulted in her nomination for one of the most important Polish literary prizes, the Nike Award.

by Zofia Sucharska