Ireneusz Kania wins the Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński Award for lifetime translatory achievement!

Ireneusz Kania, the polyglot translator working with more than a dozen languages – including Sanskrit, Tibetan and Hebrew – receives the 2023 T. Boy-Żeleński Translation Award granted by the Mayor of Gdańsk for lifetime achievement.  The official award ceremony will take place on 21 April during the Found in Translation festival. Conversation with Ireneusz Kania will be held on 22 April at 10 a.m. in the seat of City Culture Institute.

Ireneusz Kania.
fot. Renata Dąbrowska
renatadabrowska.com

The winner and finalists were chosen by the Award Committee, composed of: Carlos Marrodán Casas, Anna Korzeniowska-Bihun, Piotr Paziński, Julia Różewicz, and Anna Wasilewska (committee chair).

‘Ireneusz Kania – translator, essayist and polymath – translated several dozen books from fifteen languages. He introduced entire cultural areas to the Polish-language sphere, translating from Tibetan, Hebrew, Romanian, Greek, German, French, and Italian. His impressive output encompasses all literary genres. His translations include works by Kavafis, Eliade, Cioran, Benjamin, Scholem, Bataille, and Vasari. It is to him that we owe The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Mystic Tales from the Zohar,’ said Anna Wasilewska, committee chair and translator from French, justifying the lifetime achievement winner’s choice.

Ireneusz Kania was born in 1940 in Wieluń. While completing Romance studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, he simultaneously studied Oriental languages (Hebrew, Chinese, and Sanskrit). During that time, he played competitive sports (he is still physically active). He debuted in 1972 in Przegląd Orientalistyczny. In subsequent years, he also translated from English, German, French, Russian, Romanian, Italian, and Sanskrit. Between 1983 and 1988, he ran a private Tibetan course. In the 1990s, he taught literary translation at the Jagiellonian University’s Study of Literature and Art. Kania holds several awards and medals for his translation achievements, the latest being the T. Boy-Żeleński Translation Award granted by the Mayor of Gdańsk.