Maria Skibniewska
Maria Skibniewska was a Polish translator, primarily of English- and French-language literary fiction works.
She graduated from the and studied Polish literature at the University of Warsaw. Her studies in Romance languages were interrupted by World War II, during which she worked as a home-based weaver and survived the Warsaw Uprising. After the war, she worked as a clerk and in 1947 made her debut as a translator of literary fiction. She also served as a translator during the in Kraków and at the World [Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace] in Wrocław.
From 1950 to 1971, she worked at the Czytelnik Publishing House, initially as a stylistic proofreader and later as the head of the Romance languages literature department. Throughout this time, and during her retirement, she focused on translations, primarily of literary fiction. She translated around 100 books into Polish, including works by Jean Genet, Graham Greene, Henry James, Thomas Wolfe, Bruce Marshall, William Saroyan, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Updike, and Patrick White. She was highly regarded for her translation work.
Her older brother was, later a divisional general of the Polish People's Army, and her husband was engineer, an officer in the Home Army and a Warsaw Uprising participant.
Biography
Maria Skibińska was born on 3 May 1904. Her father, Władysław, was a civil servant who worked at the Ministry of Finance from 1920 and was previously involved in fine arts. Her mother, Zofia née Królikowski, taught at secondary schools in Warsaw. Maria had three siblings: two brothers,, who later became a divisional general in the Polish People's Army, and Józef, an aviator who died in 1939, as well as a sister.She attended the in Warsaw, where she passed her humanities maturity exam in 1922. She then began studying Polish philology at the University of Warsaw. On 18 September 1928, she married, an electrical engineer, and, having interrupted her studies, moved with him to Baden, Switzerland, where he was undergoing professional training and where they lived until 1930. She completed her Polish studies at the University of Warsaw that same year, after returning to Poland. Her thesis was dedicated to realism in the works of Honoré de Balzac and Joseph Conrad. In 1936, due to her husband's work, she moved with him to Sweden. A year later, Stanisław was appointed technical director of the in Powiśle and later became its deputy director general. At the same time, Maria began studying Romance languages at the University of Warsaw. It is also known that before the outbreak of World War II, she was a member of the Polish Red Cross and the. In the 1930s, she worked for a year at the Cecylia Plater-Zyberkówna High School.
She never completed her Romance studies, as they were interrupted by the German invasion of Poland. Fleeing from the war, Skibniewska went to Hungary and Romania, but returned to Warsaw in 1939; she lived there throughout the occupation and worked at home as a weaver. Her husband fought in the September campaign. After the regular fighting ended, he returned to his previous position at the power plant and became its director in March 1942. He was also involved in the resistance against the occupier, serving as an officer of the Home Army and co-organizing a unit of the in that area, later fighting in the Warsaw Uprising. After the defeat, he ended up in officer prisoner-of-war camps in Bergen-Belsen and Stalag X-B, while Maria found herself in Głogoczów near Kraków.
After the war, she initially supported herself by working as a secretary, later becoming a personnel officer at the Boiler Industry Association, possibly in Kraków. In 1946, she took a job in Warsaw in the foreign monitoring department of Polskie Radio. The following year, she moved to Wrocław, where her husband got a job at the Social Construction Company. That same year marked Maria's debut as a translator: the publishing house Awir from Katowice published her translation of James Hilton's novel Lost Horizons. Soon after, she returned to Warsaw, where she briefly worked as an import officer at the Rolling Bearings Bureau Polimex.
She was employed twice as a translator – in 1947 during the, which took place in Kraków, and in August 1948 during the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wrocław. In September of the same year, she was charged with espionage on behalf of the United States and was imprisoned for some time; her husband faced the same fate. Within the family, the arrest of the Skibniewskis was linked to her work at the congress.
In February 1950, Skibniewska was hired by the Czytelnik Publishing House as a stylistic editor. The change of job was associated with the arrest and trial of her brother, Franciszek. She remained associated with Czytelnik, where she later led the editorial office of Romance literature, until her retirement, which she entered on 31 July 1971. Throughout this time, Skibniewska continued her translation work; since her debut, she translated nearly 100 works from English and French. In 1956, she was admitted to the Polish Writers' Union. She was also valued for her editorial work; in 1957, Zbigniew Bieńkowski noted that she contributed significantly to Polish Romance studies in this area. In the 1950s, she led the reissue of Balzac's La Comédie humaine series.
While working at Czytelnik, she formed close relationships and friendships with translators and. Relatives and colleagues remembered her as an educated, cultured, and elegant woman who spoke impeccable Polish. As a supervisor, she was quite strict, limiting contacts to official matters without being overly familiar. At the same time, she could show sympathy and joke. She successfully combined her translation work, often with difficult and ambitious titles, with editorial duties, which was seen as a reflection of a developed work ethic, passion, and a way of adapting to post-war reality. In her interactions with people, she avoided political topics directly, concealing her dislike for the communist government, only giving her interlocutors a hint of her views. During the martial law period, she reacted very poorly to her brother's involvement in the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth, which affected their relationship. Her relative was the translator, who lived with her for several years in her youth.
Maria Skibniewska became a widow in 1958 and had no children with her husband. Over the years, she faced increasing vision problems that led to gradual loss of sight. She died on 28 October 1984. She was buried at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.
Translation work
General characteristics
Maria Skibniewska made her debut as a translator with a work classified as popular literature – Lost Horizon by James Hilton. However, she quickly moved on to translating notable authors, beginning with Dolores by H. G. Wells, which was published in Poland in 1948. Among the other writers whose works she translated are Frederick Buechner, G. K. Chesterton, Joseph Conrad, Lawrence Durrell, Maurice Druon, William Faulkner, Graham Greene, Henry James, Bruce Marshall, Guy de Maupassant, Flannery O'Connor, J. D. Salinger, William Saroyan, J. R. R. Tolkien, Thomas Wolfe, John Updike, and Nathanael West. She developed an affinity for some of these authors, as evidenced by her translations of multiple works from certain writers. One of her favorite authors was Patrick White, the Australian Nobel laureate of 1973. While she primarily translated novels and short stories from English or French, her body of work also included books on different subjects such as biographies, historical studies, several plays by Jean Genet, and articles on theater by Edward Gordon Craig, Paul Claudel, Jacques Copeau, and G. B. Shaw. Some of these translations may reflect her interest in painting and theater arts.Skibniewska was highly regarded for her translations. The criticism repeatedly emphasized her contributions to Polish literary translation and the quality of her work, and her entire body of work can be described as impressive. Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, commenting on her translation of Halldór Laxness' novel, wrote: "The richness of the language, the beauty and simplicity of the syntax, the excellent Polish – all this makes Independent People a very valuable literary work. The translation was made from English, but it is excellent". A positive assessment of Dolores was given by Zdzisław Najder in 1957, and in later years, and Alina Szala described Skibniewska as an outstanding translator, placing her among the best in Poland. Her translation of White's The [Eye of the Storm (novel)|The Eye of the Storm] was awarded the title of the best-translated book of 1976 by Literatura na Świecie magazine in 1977., who collaborated with her on the translation of Genet's plays, called her his mentor.
Despite her accomplishments as a translator and editor and her esteem within the literary community, she did not seek fame. During a meeting of the Polish Writers' Union Translation Section with , with whom she worked on Balzac's Human Comedy, she spoke only once, at the request of the meeting's host. Little about her appeared in the press, and she gave only one interview for the magazine Nowe Książki, where she discussed the publishing plans related to Latin American literature without any personal touches. The only translation she accompanied with a broader commentary was The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, for which she wrote an erudite introduction.
Skibniewska's translations were reissued and discussed for many years after her death. Among those who praised her work were and Maciej Płaza. However,, in an essay on Polish translations of Flannery O'Connor, critically engaged with some of Skibniewska's choices, while also acknowledging her descriptive skill.
Translator of Tolkien
The first book by J. R. R. Tolkien that Maria Skibniewska translated was The Hobbit, published in Polish in 1960 by. She signed the contract for the translation of The Lord of the Rings with Czytelnik in 1958. There are no records detailing the course of her work. However, it is known that in June 1959, she wrote a letter to Allen & Unwin, asking for guidance to assist her with the translation, which was forwarded to Tolkien. He promised a prompt response, but due to family issues, he took a long time to reply. It wasn't until after reminders from Czytelnik that he provided some general advice, which was sent to Skibniewska. There is no evidence of any direct correspondence between the author and the Polish translator, but it is possible that her letter, forwarded to Tolkien, is preserved in his archives at the Bodleian Library.The three volumes of The Lord of the Rings translated by Skibniewska were published in 1961, 1962, and 1963, with the majority of the poems in the novel not translated by her but by and Andrzej Nowicki. This was the third translation of Tolkien's work into a foreign language, following Dutch and Swedish.
When Lech Jęczmyk, the editor of the English section at Czytelnik, initiated work on a second edition of The Lord of the Rings as well as the Polish publication of The Silmarillion, Skibniewska, despite health issues, engaged in both tasks. She made several corrections to her translation while simultaneously working on translating another Tolkien title. Additionally, she revised the text for the new edition of The Hobbit. The second edition of The Lord of the Rings was published in 1981, while The Silmarillion came out posthumously in 1985, alongside the second edition of The Hobbit.
Skibniewska's translations are regarded as faithful to the original and well-capturing the style and language of the author, although they are not without certain errors. In the case of The Hobbit, as noted by, an expert on Tolkien's works, a significant drawback was that during preparations for the second edition, the translator did not take into account several minor changes that Tolkien made to the novel, limiting herself to translating only one chapter that the author had entirely revised. Consequently, the first complete Polish translation of The Hobbit, incorporating all of the author's changes, was done by.
Conversely, Skibniewska's translation of The Lord of the Rings is considered excellent or even nearly congruent, capturing Tolkien's elevated tone while maintaining his fluent style, making it very readable. It is regarded as the best available translation, often described as the most beautiful. The high quality of her work was partly due to the fact that she worked without haste; she had almost a year for each volume, which was a comfortable situation compared to the working conditions of authors of subsequent translations. Skibniewska's work is viewed as the canonical version of the novel in Polish. Among the English philologists who expressed high regard for her translation were,, and. It also served as the basis for the Polish translation of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film.
In her work on The Lord of the Rings, Skibniewska only partially adhered to the author's suggestions. She retained the English names of hobbits, whereas she translated some place names into Polish, especially those with clear meanings, thereby introducing the term Śródziemie into Polish. Her choice to use the word krasnolud, a diminutive form of krasnoludek. She drew it from volume III of ' edited by Witold Doroszewski, where an example of its use was cited from part II of ' by Maria Dąbrowska. The purpose of this approach was to distinguish characters from Tolkien's works from the small beings found in fairy tales. Some omissions in her translation may have stemmed from censorship, while others were conscious choices, such as the exclusion of appendices D and E in the third volume, which she considered potentially confusing for Polish readers.
In 1996, Muza published a new edition of the novel, prepared under the editorship of Marek Gumkowski, an expert on Tolkien's works. Skibniewska's translation received several corrections and additions in this edition. Both ordinary errors and modifications of certain formulations, which proved incorrect in light of Tolkien's later legacy published many years after the novel, were addressed. Some translations of the poems by Włodzimierz Lewik were replaced with new translations by, and the previously untranslated appendices D and E were translated by Ryszard Derdziński. Diacritical marks were added throughout the text, as well as in words from the languages of elves or humans invented by the author, with distinctions in the notation of the sounds k and f using the letters c, k, f, or ph. However, due to the haste surrounding this edition, not all details worth correcting were identified. In subsequent editions, Muza chose not to implement further modifications to the translation to eliminate remaining errors or inaccuracies.
Skibniewska's translation of The Silmarillion also received positive reviews. Agnieszka Sylwanowicz noted that Skibniewska employed language that evokes biblical style associations in the reader, which is not entirely consistent with the author's tone. The translation itself, as pointed out by Michał Leśniewski, was not fully prepared, but the publisher initially released it without the necessary corrections.