Beyond Joseph Conrad: 10 Polish Writers That Didn’t Write in Polish

joseph_conrad_gettyimages-158666771.jpg, default, Corona typewriter on the desk in Joseph Conrad apartment at Raffles hotel, Singapore, photo: Peter Charlesworth/LightRocket via Getty Images, Beyond Joseph Conrad: 10 Polish Writers That Didn’t Write in Polish

#language & literature

As writers from Poland wrote in languages other than Polish and their work enriched and shaped other national literatures, they often still retained aspects of their “Polishness” in their writing.

For centuries, Polish society and Polish literature have been shaped by factors that have influenced seemingly personal decisions about language or national identity. In Central and Eastern Europe, these key life-changing decisions were often rooted in the political experience of wars, partitions, and occupations, which often resulted in emigration, deportation, or other forms of displacement.

Here we take a look at how writers from Poland came to write in languages other than Polish – and how their work has gone on to enrich and shape the literature of other nations, while often retaining some aspect of their original “Polishness”.

1. Sarbievius, or the Sarmatian Horace

Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, 1640, photo: Czartoryski Museum/Domena publiczna

Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski or Sarbievius (1595-1640) may be the most famous Polish poet most people have never heard of. But in his day, at the height of the Baroque, he was a true superstar of European literature. His works, including those with copperplate frontispieces by Rubens, were published across early modern Europe, from Cologne to Vilnius, with more than 30 editions alone in the 17th century. So who was this guy?

Sarbievius was born in central Poland, not far from Warsaw (which became the Polish capital only one year before Sarbiewski’s birth). However, he spent most of his life in the Eastern provinces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where he studied and then taught rhetorics and poetics – namely in Vilnius, Krożai, and the Jesuit academia of Polock. In 1622, a Jesuit himself, Sarbievius travelled to Rome to continue his theological studies. That’s when his panegyric poem caught the eye of the new Pope, Urban VIII, who awarded him the laurel wreath, which paved the way to his international fame.

Above all a lyrical poet, Sarbiewski composed mostly panegyrical poems (in praise of poets, kings and princes) as well as odes and epigrams – on religious, philosophical and… anti-Turkish themes. He was particularly fond of Horace, whose work he fervently emulated, paraphrasing his concepts, motifs, and style.

Unfortunately, Sarbievius’s attempts to write a Polish national epic (a Sarmatian Aeneid of sorts!) about the mythical Polish ruler Lech (hence called Lechid) came to nothing. He was more successful in lauding the Polish natural landscape, which he famously did in Laus Bugi, a poem about the river Bug.

Sarbiewski was in fact one of many Polish poets writing in Latin in the early Modern period. The list includes Jan Dantyszek (Dantiscus), Klemens Janicki (Janicius), Szymon Szymonowic (Simonides), who was also known as the Polish Pindarus, and Jan Kochanowski – the latter was the greatest Polish poet of the Renaissance and the author of Latin odes, elegies and epigrams.

The downfall of Sarbievius’s fame and his model of literature (alas, all those paraphrases and emulations!) came in the 18th century and was closely connected to the decline of Latin as the language of communication of the European elites. This is likely why you have never heard of Sarbiewski.

2. Jan Potocki, the aristocrat & the pioneer of the fantastic

Hrabia Jan Potocki na obrazie Antona Graffa, 1785, fot. Zamek Królewski w Warszawie — Count Jan Potocki - Anton Graff' painting, 1785, photo: Zamek Królewski w Warszawie

Jan Potocki (1761-1815) is undoubtedly one of the most famous Polish novelists of all time and one of the most fascinating Polish writers. Yet, he would certainly have had problems explaining himself in Polish.

The author of the famed Manuscript Found in Saragossa (later turned into the 20th-century cinematic masterpiece by Wojciech Jerzy Has) hailed from one of the wealthiest Polish aristocratic families of all time. Born in Podolia (present-day Ukraine) and educated in Lausanne and Geneva, Potocki joined the Austrian Army and then embarked on a tour which took him beyond Europe. During that time, he even became a Maltese Knight.

Potocki’s knowledge of foreign languages was impressive and contributed to his studies, mostly in archaeology and history. Still, his poor Polish impeded his political career and his potential role as a member of Parliament during the Sejm Czteroletni (a last-ditch attempt to reform the Polish state). His last patriotic act, participating in the war against Russia, was followed by the Third Partition, which effectively wiped Poland from the map of Europe.

In the years following the partitions, Potocki secured a job at the Asian Department of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This allowed him to travel to the Caucasus, Mongolia, and even China. In 1811, he returned to his family estate in Ukraine, where, a few years later, he took his own life. As a result of a cosmopolitan and international career, Potocki’s oeuvre is almost entirely in French, the language which connected intellectuals and aristocrats back in the day.

Even though he also authored other works – including historical and archaeological studies (on Slavic antiquities), travel memoirs (from Egypt and Turkey), and theatre pieces written for the Potocki family’s private theatre in Tulczyn – his worldwide fame today rests solely on the Manuscript. Dubbed the last novel of the Enlightenment, its uncanny and fantastic aspects gained praise and recognition in the 20th century, including from authors such as Roger Caillois, Italo Calvino, and Tzvetan Todorov. The latter considered Potocki an important pioneer of the fantastic in prose.

3. Tadeusz Bułharyn, or the best-selling author & Russian agent

Tadeusz Bułharyn, 1853, litografia, fot. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie — Tadeusz Bułharyn, 1853, lithograph, photo: Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie

Poles making a literary career in Russia and in Russian may seem rather a controversial and risky endeavour… And yet this was not an altogether unique occurrence across the last two centuries, as numerous examples show, from Osip Senkowski to Sigismund Krzizhanovski.

Perhaps the most notorious case of such line-crossers was that of Tadeusz Bułharyn (1789-1859), or, as he is known in Russia, Faddei Bulgarin – a figure who combined literature, politics and straight-up denouncement.

Bułharyn, born into a noble family from Belarus, grew up in Petersburg, attending an elite cadet school before joining the Russian Army in 1805. However, just a couple of years later, like many Poles, he joined Napoleon’s 1812 campaign against Russia. In fact, he made it all the way to Moscow and back, famously helping Napoleon to cross the Berezina River.

Back in Russia, Bułharyn decided to ditch his military career and began writing columns, which became an instant success. He founded a highly popular literary magazine called The Northern Bee (Severnaya Pchela). But it was the novel Ivan Vyzhgin (1829) that catapulted Bulgarin into nationwide fame. The book, which sold 7000 copies in the first days after publication, is considered the first bestseller in the history of Russian literature, making its way from the literary salons to the mass readership.

The novel, featuring the uplifting story of a peasant boy making his way across what seemed to be the entire Russian Empire, was beloved by readers but often castigated by critics, some of whom found it not Russian enough. In fact, when writing it, Bułharyn relied heavily on the 18th-century Polish novel The Adventures of Nicholas Empiricus (1786) by Ignacy Krasicki as inspiration. Still, for Russian readers, he was a pioneering figure comparable to Western European authors like Defoe and Lesage. He was even called the Russian Walter Scott.

It turns out that, while he was furthering his brilliant literary career, Bułharyn was also a key secret collaborator of the notorious III Department of the Russian Security Service. And yet, even this work as a denouncer did not stop him from being a friend of Poland. In fact, throughout most of his life, Bułharyn preferred a more distanced position from the Petersburg court, living on his estate on the outskirts of today’s Tartu, Estonia.

Praised and despised in his day, he’s largely been forgotten today – he is even an obscure figure for Russian literature experts. Perhaps, ultimately, Bułharyn’s greatest service to the history of literature lies in his active support and defence of Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod upon its publication in Russia in 1828. He was also a key figure enabling Mickiewicz’s flight from Russia the following year. Say what you will about Bułharyn, but this was indeed a tremendous service to Polish literature.

4. Joseph Conrad, or the son of his fatherland

Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) - part of a handwritten letter from Conrad to Clement Shorter, photo by Culture Club/Getty Images. Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) 1920, photo: Â© Jt Vintage/Glasshouse via ZUMA Wire/Getty Images — Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) - part of a handwritten letter from Conrad to Clement Shorter, photo by Culture Club/Getty Images. Joseph Conrad (Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) 1920, photo: © Jt Vintage/Glasshouse via ZUMA Wire/Getty Images

Joseph Conrad may be one of the most famous British writers of all time, but his path to global fame and becoming a classic of British literature was anything but obvious. The future star of British literature only began learning English when he was an adult, and it would be the third language he came to master (after his native Polish and the French which he learned as a boy).

Born in present-day Ukraine, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (his full name) was only five when his father, the Polish patriot and political activist Apollo Korzeniowski, was sentenced to deportation by the Russian Empire. A couple years later his mother died of tuberculosis, which she contracted during this forced stay in the North, and his father soon followed. An orphan, Józef was only seventeen when he traveled to Marseille and embarked on a ship, starting a career which would yield material for most of his future writing.

However, Conrad’s Polish past and family background left an indelible mark on his literature. From the adopted penname, through the most poignant motifs and symbols (the Patna ship) and general themes of his novels (honour, dignity, perseverance), Conrad’s oeuvre is chock full of hidden allusions and references to Polish Romantic literature and the troubled history and rich culture of his homeland. Not to mention memorable Polish protagonists of his stories like Prince Roman or Janko Gooral.

Perhaps the most striking element pointing to the legacy of his home country, can be found in his uncompromising attitude toward the Russian Empire. Like his father (who authored an relentless cutting critique of the Moscovian imperialism), Conrad believed that the Russian Empire was a dark and inherently despotic force. He also found this true with regards to the Russian revolutionaries and future communists, whose project he brilliantly deconstructed in his novel Under Western Eyes.

5. Stanisław Przybyszewski, or a Polish satanist writing in German

Stanisław Przybyszewski, photo: reprodukcja Wiesław M. Zieliński/East News

Possessed by the demon of music and an erotomaniac endowed with satanic powers of imagination and a nihilistic worldview, Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927) is considered one of the brightest stars of European literature at the turn of the 20th century. He introduced new concepts such as nihilism, decadence and yes, satanism. Not many people know this, but the story that rocketed him to international fame started out in German.

Born in the Wielkopolska region, the cradle of Polish historical statehood, Przybyszewski moved to Berlin in 1888, shortly after graduating from a German school in Toruń. In Berlin, he enrolled at university to study architecture, but rather than studying, Przybyszewski led a bohemian lifestyle and quickly became a central figure in an international milieu that included Richard Dehmel, Edvard Munk, Ola Hansson, and Dagny Juel.

It was during these six years at the end of the 19th century that Przybyszewski wrote and published his first breakthrough German works, such as Totenmesse (known in Polish as Requiem Aeternam) and Vigilien, the famous essays The Psychology of an Individual and The Synagogue of Satan, as well as a series of novels, the most famous one being The Children of Satan.

It was also here, in the German literary world, that Prybyszewski gained the reputation of “a serious writer… with a name difficult to pronounce”, as well as that of “a genius Pole” (coined by none other than August Strindberg). He was also dubbed “the bohemian king”, “the genius of the Slavic race”, and “the new Messiah of literature”.

His scandalous and controversial behaviour was reflected in numerous German novels that portrayed him as a fictional character, perhaps most famously in Julius Bierbaum’s Stilpe. All of this contributed to Przybyszewski’s reputation as “likely the most fascinating figure of the German fin de siècle”.

Przybyszewski’s demonic figure proved an inspiring one indeed. His impact on the Berlin Modernist movement was significant, most importantly influencing Dehmel and Strindberg (who developed a rather morbid obsession with the Pole). He is also credited with putting an end to Naturalist and realist idioms of German literature and paving the way for a new Modernist and individualist approach.

Toward the end of the decade, Przybyszewski moved to Kraków, where he became part of the influential bohemian circle, only to return to Germany (Munich this time) in 1906. He eventually returned to Poland as it regained independence in 1918. According to some readers, Przybyszewski was a better writer in German than in Polish, and his Polish work bears the mark of his German style.

It’s worth noting that Przybyszewski was not the only Pole at the time to have used both Polish and German in his works. There were others, like playwright Tadeusz Rittner, poet and playwright Eleonora Kalkowska or philosopher Roman Ingarden, to name a few. A tradition that continues today with Christian Skrzyposzek, Radek Knapp and Artur Becker.

6. Wincenty Korab-Brzozowski, or the last French Symbolist

Wincenty Korab-Brzozowski z Wincenty Korab-Brzozowski, Utwory zebrane, Kraków 1980, fot. Demona publiczna

Poles writing in French aren’t particularly special. Apart from Jan Potocki, Adam Mickiewicz (Les Confederates) and Juliusz Słowacki (Roi de Ladava) did it, too. Marie Krysińska, an émigré from Warsaw and a successful cabaret performer in fin-de-siecle Paris, wrote her pioneering free-verse poems in French. Apollinaire and Oscar Milosz – both among the most significant French poets of the 20th century – had Polish backgrounds as well. Then there was the scandalising communist novel by Bruno Jasieński (I Burn Paris) and the futurist poems by Brzękowski.

For something more elegant and elevating, let’s go back to the late 19th century.

Born in Syria, Wincenty Korab-Brzozowski (1877-1941) was the son of a French-Syrian mother and Polish Romantic poet Karol Brzozowski, who emigrated to the Ottoman Empire after the fall of the January Uprising. Wincenty also had an older brother, Stanisław, who became an important Symbolist poet and a key figure in the Kraków bohemian milieu.

Wincenty, meanwhile, chose the life of a vagabond, travelling around Europe and Asia and writing poetry. When writing in both French and Polish, he was inspired by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and the Greek-French poet Moreas, and drew on Buddhist and East Asian philosophy. During his lifetime, he published only one book of poems (1910), and his esoteric poetry found little understanding among readers, who considered it anachronistic, classicist, and him a graphomaniac.

Vincent de Korab, as he would sign his French poems, returned to Poland in 1935. He died in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation. This is where he wrote his last highly accomplished series of French poems, Stances.

7. Anna Langfus, or doomed to survive

Anna Langfus, 1962, Paris, photo: Paul Almasy/AKG Images/Forum

World War II redefined both Polish society and literature, reshaping the character of Polish-language poetry and prose.

Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors wrote in many languages. One of the most prolific among these authors was Anna Langfus (1920-1966), a Polish-born French playwright and novelist whose work was entirely devoted to the Shoah and the drama of those who survived.

Born in Lublin as Anna Regina Sternfinkel, Langfus graduated from a Polish school and went on to study in Belgium before the outbreak of World War II caught her in her hometown while she was visiting for the holidays. She managed to survive the Nazi occupation, first in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lublin, and then in hiding, while working closely with the Home Army. But most of her relatives (including her parents and husband) were murdered.

The dramatic story of the author’s survival is the subject of Langfus’s debut novel Salt and Sulfur (Le Sel et le Soufre), published in France in 1960, where she moved shortly after the war. The book was widely acclaimed upon publication and is still considered one of the most significant testimonies from the Holocaust, and one of the earliest in the French language. For many readers in France, Langfus’s book (along with others by Eli Wiesel and fellow Pole Piotr Rawicz) became the key to understanding what happened to the European Jewish community during World War II.

The novel effectively transformed the author into the voice of both the murdered and the survivors.

„I felt that it wasn’t important whether I wrote a good or bad book, but rather that I realised that my book would only be good if I was able to remain faithful to the truth, of which I am not the only bearer”

Written in cold and precise French, the book is also a testimony to Langfus’s decision to sidestep her native Polish language (in which she wrote her first pieces) and write in a foreign tongue, even while retaining an intimate, even sensual, as she put it, relationship with the Polish language and Polish literature (she was especially fond of Słowacki).

Langfus went on to write two more novels (including The Bags of Sand, for which she received the Prix Goncourt), ten plays and a handful of short stories, before her life was cut short at 46 by a heart attack in 1966.

8. Jerzy Kosiński, or the eternal scandalist

Jerzy Kosiński na spotkaniu z czytelnikami w księgarni Czytelnik, Warszawa, 1989, fot. Aleksander Jałosiński/Forum — Jerzy Kosiński meets Polish readers in the Czytelnik bookstore in Warsaw, 1989, photo: Aleksander Jałosiński/Forum

Indeed, the most scandalous and controversial among “Polish writers who didn’t write in Polish”, Jerzy Kosiński (1933-1991) was also the most prominent celebrity and mystery in our group. His path from a migrant from Eastern Europe to stardom as a celebrity author was full of mysteries, starting with his unclear liaison with the CIA and continuing on to accusations of plagiarism and pornography. He himself rarely contributed to clearing up these controversies.

Born in Łódź as Jerzy Nikodem Lewinkopf, Kosiński survived the Nazi occupation of Poland together with his parents, living with a peasant family in the Polish countryside. The reminiscences and (mostly) fantasies from this period would make up the subject matter of his most famous novel, the English-language The Painted Bird (1965), which was published in America several years after he had left Poland under the communist regime in 1957.

The book, a story of a boy, either a Gypsy or a Jew, who wanders from village to village in an unspecified part of Eastern Europe, was the cause of numerous controversies. Initially considered an autobiographical account, its images of violence, rape and incest were labelled pornographic by critics. Meanwhile, the Polish diaspora considered the book’s scenes of brutal peasant life as anti-Polish, while the criticism coming from Poland’s communist authorities alleged Kosiński was an asset of the CIA.

Later accusations alleged that Kosiński was not the author of the book, which was supposedly written by ghostwriters. More recently, Polish scholars have shown that the novel contains material lifted from ethnographic sources and that, on the whole, it cannot be read as historical testimony, but rather as a largely fictional and fantastical work of art.

The controversy surrounding Painted Bird tarnished Kosiński’s reputation, and his later life was marked by accusations of inauthenticity and fraud. Something corroborated by Kosiński himself, who indulged in mystifying his life and image.

But Kosiński went on to write other important books which stood the test of time. His Being There, a satire on America’s media culture (TV in particular), was adapted into a movie starring Peter Sellers (Polish critics still pointed to similarities with the famous interwar novel Nikodem Dyzma). His other novel, The Steps, was mentioned by David Foster Wallace among the five most underappreciated U.S. novels (“Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosiński goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined”).

Kosiński’s life and work have continued to inspire readers and writers even many years after his death, as proved by the unmasking biography Black Painted Bird by Joana Siedlecka, the memoir Good Night, Dżerzi by Janusz Głowacki, and the novel Jerzy by Jerome Charyn.

9. Stefan Themerson

Stefan Themerson, Warsaw, 1959, photo: Andrzej Szypowski/East News

The artist couple Stefan and Franciszka Themerson is certainly most famous for their role in running the publishing house Gaberbochus Press. Founded in 1948 in London, the company, which specialised in avant-garde and experimental literature, printed over 70 titles, including works by Guillaume Apollinaire (Caligrammes), Kurt Schwitters, Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi), and Raymond Queneau (Exercises in Style).

But their own artistic output is just as impressive. In pre-war Warsaw, where the couple married in 1931, they produced avant-garde films (one of these, Europe, based on a futurist poem by Anatol Stern, was rediscovered just a couple of years ago), work they continued in London, where they moved from Paris in 1942.

While Franciszka, a painter and illustrator, was primarily concerned with visual arts (she oversaw all Gaberbochus publications), Stefan was first and foremost a writer and philosopher. His output, which included nine novels, children’s stories, poems, a play, an opera, and essays on language, logic, science, art, film, and typography, brilliantly combined literature and philosophy. His avant-garde approach to literature is best reflected in one of his own inventions, namely, semantic poetry.

Fluent in a couple of languages, Stefan’s English oeuvre consists of poems (Mr Rouse Builds His House), theoretical writings, as well as several rather philosophical novels. While some of these were actually self-translations from the Polish (as was likely his best-known work, Professor Mmaa, or Bayamus, which Bertrand Russel famously dubbed “nearly as mad as the world”), others can be considered original English novels.

These include such titles as Tom Harris’s The Mystery of the Sardine (original title: Euclid Was An Ass) and Themerson’s last novel, Hobson’s Island (1988). These late novels, which feature many plots and characters (including the Themersonian stock characters, such as Cardinal Polatuo or General Piesc), often follow the model of a political thriller or detective story, but ultimately are incomparable to anything else written in English.

10. Janina Katz, or a Polish Jew writing in Danish

Janina Katz, Wrocław, 2009, fot. Maciej Świerczyński /AW

In March 1968, the communist government of People’s Poland unleashed a wave of antisemitism, effectively forcing the emigration of the remainder of the Polish Jewish community left alive after the Holocaust. In the aftermath of these events (often referred to as March’ 68), many Polish Jews found themselves stranded and exiled, without passports and having to start over abroad.

This was also the case for many writers and intellectuals, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Arnold Słucki, Natan Tenenbaum, Wilhelm Dichter, Anna Frajlich-Zając, Maciej Zaremba-Bielawski, and Henryk Grynberg (he actually left in 1967), as well as Polish Yiddish authors, like Kalman Segal, Moyshe Shklar, or Dovid Sfard.

For Janina Katz (1939-2013), who was living in Kraków in 1968, this meant a rapid transition from her beloved home city to Copenhagen, Denmark. While Copenhagen became her home, throughout the next forty years, she remained an active promoter of Polish literature, working as a translator (Herbert, Szymborska, Miłosz) and literary critic. But it took her more than 20 years to start writing in Danish.

Katz debuted in 1991 with a book of poems entitled Min Moders Datter (My Mother’s Daughter). Two years later, she wrote her first autobiographical novel, Mit Liv som Barbar (My Life as a Barbarian). The book, which told her and her mother’s story of survival during the Holocaust, was recognised as the best Danish book of the year. Her next novel, Putska (Pucka), was also an autobiographical tale of the author’s growing up in the People’s Republic of Poland in the 1950s and 1960s, as the protagonist uncovers her Jewish identity and is confronted by the wave of antisemitism in 1968.

Katz went on to write five novels, thirteen books of poems, and two short story collections, many of which received some of the most important Danish literary awards.

“I’m a Polish Jew who lives in Denmark and writes in Danish,” is how she repeatedly defined her identity.

Despite this declaration, towards the end of her life, Janina Katz started writing poetry in Polish. In 2012, her Skrevet på Polsk (Written in Polish), which consisted of Danish translations of her Polish poems, was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, often referred to as the Nordic Nobel Prize.

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