ZIELIŃSKI Bronisław

Born 22 August 1914 in Innichen (today: San Candido, Italy) while his parents were on holiday; son of the doctor Leon Zieliński, and Wieńczysława née Kwiecińska. He was raised on the Żbików estate near Warsaw. He attended the Stanisław Staszic Grammar School in Warsaw, completing his advanced secondary education in 1933. A keen hunter, he joined the Polish Hunting Association in 1930. He studied law at the University of Warsaw (UW) between 1933 and 1938. He was a member of the Falanga National Radical Camp. He did military service at the Officer Cadet School of the Cavalry Reserve in Grudziądz. Following the outbreak of World War II, he was a soldier in the September campaign in the rank of officer cadet in the First Józef Piłsudski Light Cavalry Regiment. He was taken into Soviet captivity but in Złoczów (Ukrainian: Zolochiv) escaped a convoy heading towards an internment camp for Polish officers. He subsequently reached Warsaw, where he worked in Janina Mortkowicz's bookshop and then as a labourer in a roofing paper factory. In November 1939, he married the painter Monika Żeromska, daughter of the author Stefan. They divorced in 1941. He was involved in the underground actions of the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and then the Home Army (AK). He was a member of the AK Bureau of Information and Propaganda and of the Government Delegation for Poland. The Archive of the Underground Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government Delegation for Poland was housed in his home in Żbików (now part of Pruszków), near Warsaw. He collaborated with the "Biuletyn Informacyjny" periodical. He was involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was also a member of the editorial board of the partisan periodical "Barykada", which was published the the Third District of the AK. Following the end of the war in 1945, he worked briefly at the Cultural Heritage Revindication Office of the Ministry of Culture and Arts, before working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1946, he moved to the National Museum and then worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) Mission in Poland where he was chief translator. He later edited the Western Press Agency's English-language bulletin as well as its bulletin for Polish émigrés, promoting Poland's claims to the former German territories awarded to the postwar state. In 1947, he married Barbara, née Jankowska. He was arrested the same year and in 1949 was accused, among other things, of sedition and spying. He was held in Mokotów prison until February 1950 before being moved to Rawicz. Following his release in November 1950, he worked as a translator for the Polish international trade magazine "Polski Handel Zagraniczny" and was also an editor for publication series of the Polish Institute of International Affairs and the Warsaw Learned Society. From 1951, he focused exclusively on translations of English-language literature. He made his debut with a translation of Jack Lindsay's novel Fires in Smithfield, which appeared in Polish as Łuny nad Smithfield in 1951. He joined the Polish Writers' Union (Translators' Section) in 1954. In 1958, 1965 and 1969, he travelled to the United States on a Ford Foundation grant. There, he established extensive contacts with US-American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Erskine Caldwell and William Styron. He also travelled to Norway, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Turkey. He received the lifetime achievement award of the Polish PEN Club in 1960, while in 1964 he was awarded the Roy Publishers prize in New York for the best translations of English-language literature in the period 1961-63. He served on the board of the PEN Club (1966-76), while he also served the PEN Club Translators' Section from 1948 to 1973). He was also a member of the Board of the International Federation of Translators (FIT), participating in the Federation's congresses in Stuttgart in 1970 and Nice in 1974 as the Polish delegate. His translations of English-language literature appeared in periodicals including "Literatura na Świecie" (1971-73), "Polityka" (1973), "Życie Literackie" (1971), and "Kultura" (1973). In 1980, he received the State Literary Prize – second class and the prize of the Polish Society of Authors and Composers (ZAiKS). He was the recipient of numerous honours, including the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1974), the Silver Medal for Merits in the Field of Glory (1974), the Meritorious Activist of Culture honour (1975), and the Cross of the Home Army (1978). He died on 9 March 1985 in Warsaw and is buried at the city's Reformed Evangelical Cemetery. He had two children from his second marriage, Tomasz and Anna.