DOLATOWSKA Krystyna

Born on 12[1] February 1923 in Radom; daughter of the bank clerk Marian Łabędź and the teacher Stefania Żerańska (who died after giving birth). She spent her childhood in Radom and then Warsaw, where she completed her education at the Sisters of the Resurrection (Sióstr Zmartwychwstanek) Comprehensive School. From 1934 she attended the T. Chałubiński State Secondary School in Radom, which in 1939 became the Women's Secondary and Grammar School No. 3. In 1937, she published a short story titled Marię wyrzucili (Maria was Expelled) in "Sztubackie Głosy" (no. 1; using the alias: K.Ł.), a publication for middle school pupils, while in 1938 she published an article titled Żeromski — a ziemia kielecka (Żeromski and the Kielce region) as K. Łabędziówna (issue no. 2). She remained in Radom following the outbreak of the Second World War. She and her family changed their surname to Łubińska in 1939. She studied at the trade school and in parallel attended secret underground courses, completing advanced secondary eduaction in 1942. In 1941, she started working as a telephonist at the post office. She collaborated with the underground Home Army (AK). In April 1945, she started a degree in Romance studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (UJ). In June 1947, she completed a course in French studies at the Institut Français in Krakow. She moved to Warsaw in 1948 and continued her degree in Romance philology at the University of Warsaw (UW). In December 1949, she started working as an editor in the literary department of the publishing cooperative Książka i Wiedza and she also translated texts from French. She graduated from UW in June 1950 having defended her master's dissertation on the work of Guy de Maupassant. In 1950, she started publishing translations of French prose.. In June 1952 she was transferred to the Romance Editorial Office at the state pubishing house Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy (PIW), where she worked until 1954. She subsequently remained with PIW as a translator. From 1956 to 1982 she was a member of the Translators' Section of the Polish Writers' Union (ZLP). She made several visits to France to see her school friend and novelist Zofia Romanowiczowa. She returned to PIW in 1969, serving as acting director of the Editorial Office for Romance Literature until 1972. She relinquished the post and full-time employment in 1972 to concentrate on translation work. She won the Polish Translators' Association (Stowarzyszenie Tłumaczy Polskich) Award in 1987. She was a member of the Polish Society of Authors and Composers (ZAiKS) from 1971 and the Association of Polish Writers from 1989. She joined the PEN Club in 1989. She also wrote a diary, prose and poetry, which she did not publish (although in 2014 "Zeszyty Literackie", no. 2, did posthumously publish a fragment of her prose under the title Pejzaż [Landscape]).

She married the construction technician Zbigniew Dolatowski in 1949. He went on to become an illustrator and bibliophile. Her son Jakub Zbigniew was born in 1953 and worked as a dendrologist. She died on 25 August 2012 in Warsaw, where she is buried at the city's Northern Cemetery (Cmentarz Północny).