Leszek Engelking

Leszek Maria Engelking (2 February 1955 – 22 October 2022) was a Polish poet, short story writer, novelist, translator, literary critic, essayist, Polish philologist, and literary academic, scholar, and lecturer.

Engelking translated a vast amount of literature into Polish, from Spanish, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Slovak but in particular from Czech.

Literary Memberships Engelking was a member of Association of Polish Writers since 1989, and the Polish monthly Tygiel Kultury. Surrealism, underground, postmodernizm. Szkice o literaturze czeskiej (2001, ), Codzienność i mit. Poetyka, programy i historia Grupy 42 w kontekstach dwudziestowiecznej awangardy i postawangardy (2005, ), Nowe Mity. Twórczość Jáchyma Topola (2016, The New Myths. The Literary Oeuvre of Jáchym Topol, ), and Bytom w literaturze (2018, Bytom in Literature, ).

Engelking edited the anthology of British and American poetry Wyspy na jeziorze (1988, The Lake Isles), the anthology of Czech poetry Maść przeciw poezji (2008, Ointment against Poetry), the selection from the works of three contemporary Slovak poets, Oleg Pastier, Karol Chmel, and Ivan Kolenič, Oko za ząb (2006, An Eye for a Tooth ), as well as the anthology of imagist poetry Obraz i wir (2016, Image and Vortex, Andrzej Szuba was a joint editor of the book, ).

Literary translator career He has translated works by Nabokov, Daniela Hodrova, Jáchym Topol, Ezra Pound, Miroslav Holub, Charles Bukowski, Christopher Reid, Nikolay Gumilyov, Petr Mikeš, Ivan Wernisch, Ivan Blatný, Agneta Pleijel, Oldřich Wenzl, Richard Caddel, Jaroslav Seifert, Václav Burian, Egon Bondy, Maximilian Voloshin, David A. Carrión, Gerardo Beltrán, W. B. Yeats, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, Jiří Kolář, Karel Čapek, Basil Bunting, Amy Lowell, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Kerry Shawn Keys, sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Federico García Lorca, Abel Murcia, Sergey Zavyalov, Iryna Zhylenko, Lina Kostenko, and Andrei Khadanovich.

Engelking's selection of short stories by Ladislav Klíma appeared in 2004 (Jak będzie po śmierci [How It Will Be after Death]), his translation of Michal Ajvaz’s book of poems, short stories and a novel was published in 2005 (Morderstwo w hotelu Intercontinental. Powrót starego warana. Inne miasto The Murder in the Intercontinental Hotel. The Return of the Old Comodo Dragon. Other City). Ajvaz's novel Voyage to the South in his translation appeared in 2016 (Podróż na Południe).

Honours The Award of "Literatura na Świecie" for translation (1989, 2003, 2009, 2018), The Award of Polish Translators’ and Interpreters’ Society (2000) Polish PEN Club Award (2010)